- Email: [email protected]
Leadership and information processing: Linking perceptions and performance
109
Book Reviews
Nonetheless, it seems important to express our gratitude and to suggest, as we believe Ralph Stogdill might have wished, that the next edition be labeled simply The Handbook of L.eadership, 4th edition, and that its author be shown simply as Bernard M. Bass.
REFERENCES Bass, B.M. (1981). StogdiNS handbook of leadership: A survey of theory and research (rev. ed.). New York: Free Press. Bass, B.M. (1990). Bass & Stogdill’s handbook of leadership: Theory, research, & managerial applications (3rd ed.). New York: Free Press. Stogdill, R.M. (1974). Handbook of leadership: A survey of theory and research. New York: Free Press.
leadership
and Information
Processing: Linking Perceptions and Performance
by Robert C. Lord and Karen J. Maher Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991, 340 i- xi pages, cloth. Reviewed by Karl E. Weick, University
of Michigan-Ann
Arbor.
Lord and Maher define leadership as “the process of being perceived by others as a leader” (p. 11) and mate this definition with current research on cognition and information processing. The outcome suggests a promising way to shore up the waning influence of organizational behavior on organizational studies. The outcome also suggests that the life of a leader is much more complicated and iffy than merely living out a vision in public. Once one adopts the premise that to be a leader, one must be seen as a leader, several “golden-oldies” in the leadership field take on new meaning. For example, “leadership traits” now become concepts that say more about perceivers than they do about leaders. Traits are seen as schemas, knowledge structures, and sensemaking devices by which a perceiver begins to decide whether a flurry of assertive actions are evidence that one is watching an extrovert or a leader. This all looks pretty straightforward until Lord and Maher begin to partition this social-perceptual activity. The heart of their theory (chs. 2-4) involves the distinction between recognition-based perceptual processes (ch. 3) and inference-based perceptual processes (ch. 4). Recognition-based processes tend to be those which are dominated by categories, automatic processing, and implicit theories of leadership, all of which tend to be activated in face-to-face contacts at lower levels in the organization. Inferential processes tend to be those which are dominated by attributions, controlled processing, and inferences made from salient outcomes and events rather than from face-to-face contacts, all of which means these processes tend to be associated with perceptions of executive leadership. What makes these distinctions consequential is the difference between automatic and controlled processing. Existing knowledge structures such as scripts, prototypes,
110
LEADERSHIP
QUARTERLY
Vol. 4 No. 1 1993
categories, and implicit theories, are built up from experience, stored in long-term memory, and activated automatically. This automatic processing enables people to interpret, simplify, and integrate environmental information. The more readily observations are tied to these categories, the less the demand on short-term memory. Controlled processing, by contrast, involves serial, effortful, intentional information processing that places high demands on short-term working memory and interferes with other cognitive activities. To think carefully about causality is to use up cognitive resources quickly. The demanding nature of controlled processing means that it is used less often than is automatic processing. And when controlled processing is used, it is quickly overloaded. When these innocent propositions are combined, they suggest some novel predictions. For example, the process of image management in face-to-face contact may use up cognitive resources. If it does, then the person managing the impression may not have sufficient resources to gauge the impact of the presentation on a supervisor (p. 135). Thus, image management is precarious at best. As another example, charismatic leadership may be significant only when people use stereotypes and automatic processing to evaluate leaders. As observers use more controlled processing and pay more attention to analytic skills and effects on performance, the impact of charisma may decline (p. 222). The argument that knowledge structures determine whether an act will be coded as leadership or something else, puts some substance under Barnard’s oft-quoted but seldom documented assertion that leadership boils down to a silent vote in the trenches when a command is given. If the command matches the schema, leadership is reaffirmed and people move out of the trenches. If the command does not match, things get more dicey. One of the darker implications of the focus on follower schemas is that women may find it hard to be taken seriously as leaders. This is made clear in a stunning chapter, “Perceptions of Women in Management.” Terri L. Baumgardner is the lead author of this chapter with Lord and Maher as co-authors. Gender-related information processing occurs when females are in a minority in management positions and gender becomes salient as a basis for categorization. This has several consequences. Observers process what women do in terms of gender-related categories (e.g., friendliness, attractiveness, nurturing) rather than work-related categories (e.g., dependability, initiative, motivation). As a result, information related to management potential of women is neither encoded nor stored. It is simply ignored. When women are considered for promotion, evaluators have no clear assessment of their management potential because this judgment has not been made repeatedly nor has it been updated. Instead, actions have overwhelmingly been coded as feminine-unfeminine, not leadershipfollowership. Thus, females may be evaluated less accurately than males due to an automatic information process. The most foolproof way around this vicious circle (few woman at the top makes gender salient, which leads to more gender-related processing and less recall of workrelated successes, which leads to fewer women at the top) may be for women to act in ways which have immediate, direct effects from which people can infer capabilities for leadership (p. 112). Using a different image, one way out of gender-related processing may be through small wins, the creation of tangible, immediate, local, stand-alone achievements to which a woman is visibly and reliably attached.
Book Reviews
111
Lord and Maher argue that most existing leadership studies focus on automatic, faceto-face, recognition-based processes among lower management. That assertion lays out a marvelously inviting research agenda in terms of the gaps it identifies. Those gaps become self-evident as the book unfolds. As it moves from middle management to top management and from micro to macro levels of analysis, the argument is supported less by the innovative empirical work of Lord and his associates, and sounds more like a garden variety discussion of general management in the context of topics such as strategy, culture, succession, and power. There are several reasons why scholars of leadership should study this book. Most important, the book is an integrated introduction to Lord’s important and finely crafted work (33 of his studies ground the argument). This work is scattered throughout the literature, and it is not until its summary here that the implications for leadership become evident. This book clearly is the best description we have on the mind of the follower. As more researchers begin to invoke the imagery of sense-making and interpretation to describe organizational behavior, the ideas of Lord and Maher provide a plausible language to talk about these phenomena. Sense-making, for example, often represents a choice as to whether one will use a person-based (e.g., trait) or event-based (e.g., script) knowledge structure as a source of labels for an observed behavior. Since person-based structures are more automatic and more fully developed, they tend to dominate, which suggests why ieadership traits have had such a grip on leadership studies over the years and why the fundamental attribution error is so persistent. There are excellent discussions of on-line processing and updating of impressions, dyadic processes such as behavioral confirmation, and current work by people such as Walsh, Porac, Meindl, and Graen. Also, of course, there is the striking chapter on perceptual problems associated with women in management. There are parts of the argument, however, that seem to be less successful. These rough spots are wonderful because they force reflection on the question, does the problem lie with Lord and Maher or with the field? For example, the last half of the book makes extensive use of cusp catastrophe theory. This allows Lord and Maher to use a newer graphic to display the insights of Tushman and Romanelli, Miles and Snow, and Astley and Van de Ven. But the simple phrase, “incrementa change differs from discontinuous change,” captures the insights just as well and in less space. Furthermore, an increase on the abscissa of the cusp representation is more difficult to interpret than is a decrease. The authors repeatedly refer to “moving through the cusp” during periods of ascent, yet a literal tracing of movement on the graphic surface shows that there is a always a severe regression during periods of ascent. That is fascinating if intended, but it appears not to be. The authors avow an interest in “social perceptions” as early as chapter 5, but their treatment, like so much in social cognition, makes the phrase sound like a contradiction in terms. Social is equated with a superior-subordinate dyad, viewed largely from the side of the subordinate. “Shared” perspectives are posited without any discussion of how the sharing occurs. The possibility that schemas are the basis for distinctions between in-group and out-group identity is not considered. Nor do the authors reach the issue of how leaders view subordinates. Finally, there is the fascinating set of issues that flow from the large number of dichotomies that figure in Lord and Maher’s argument. Although I have missed some,
112
LEADERSHIP
QUARTERLY
Vol. 4 No. 1 1993
they argue that important distinctions include high/low cognitive load, person/ category-based processing, trait/event-based processing, convergent/ divergent periods, top down/ bottom up processing, automatic/ controlled processing, recognition/ inference, direct/ indirect influence, external/ internal focus, leader/ perceiver-oriented, evolutionary/ revolutionary, and executive/ middle/ bottom management. These are plausible ways to carve up a stream of events, but they also mirror the 2 X 2 mindset so common among experimentalists and the one concept per finding mindset of cognitive researchers. Lists of particulars such as those conveyed by Kahneman and Tversky, Nisbett and Ross, or Thaler are not much help until we move to higher-order concepts such as controlled/ automatic processing, mindful/mindless action, or procedural/ declarative memory. Lord and Maher have made an important advance by reducing the number of cognitive concepts into the workable 2 X 2 of recognition/inferential and automatic/controlled. The elegance and economy of this move, however, gets undermined when they are forced to retreat back to the lists for specific predictions based on ad hoc rationales. That this is the way they have to operate says more about the field than about them. The solid contribution that Lord and Maher have assembled provides a pretext to see more clearly other aspects of leadership. We wonder, for example, just what dors happen in face-to-face information processing? Daft and Lengel have argued that faceto-face contacts are rich communication media with high requisite variety. Yet, if social interaction makes high demands on information processing, people in face-to-face contact should rely more heavily on automatic processes and top-down processing such as prototype matching. If prototypes and stereotypes dominate face-to-face contact, then participants might think they are learning things when, in fact, they are not. Faceto-face contacts may be an increasingly impoverished medium, the more novel the other is and the more quickly the other uses up short-term memory. All of which may get us right back to the dilemma of women in management. We also begin to ask, could controlled information processing disappear from organizational life? If controlled processing is organized into prototypes which are then invoked during automatic processing, then how do knowledge structures get revised and when do we ever feel the need to do effortful, intentional information processing? Those moments of novel input when we are best able to revise the prototype, are also the most demanding, which triggers automatic processing and leaves us least likely to change the prototype. Theorists argue that high-velocity environments, the turn to globalization, and radical downsizing all force revolution, discontinuous change, and transformation. Fine, except that all this novelty overloads short-term working memory. And when short-term memory is overloaded, well-rehearsed automatic processing kicks in. The jolt of globalization forces people back onto ethnocentric certainties, not forward into new integrations. The glass ceiling, in times of discontinuity, will become harder to penetrate, not easier, as people resort to more gender-related processing. “Oldfashioned” implicit theories of leadership (e.g., leader as hero, Reagan?) will become stronger screens against which current claims of leadership are assessed. Thus, it should not be so surprising that we find ourselves going “back to the basics.” There is too much overload to allow much controlled processing. (This may be why we see renewed interest in Schneider and Schffrin’s (1977) contrast between automatic and controlled processing in the recent work of people like Sutton, Louis, Reger, Langer).
113
Book Reviews
The only way to deal with overload and create room for controlled processing may be through incremental change. Incremental change at least reduces demands on shortterm memory, even if it also repeatedly feels like too little, too late. Incremental changes allow people to focus on specifics, build categories from the bottom up, and think in terms of continua rather than dichotomies (pp. 31-33). Bottom-up processing under less cognitive load should produce some change in knowledge structures, which then enables the encoding of newer behaviors as the modified structure begins to be evoked more often with less effort. This suggests an agenda for leaders as well as a set of criteria against which their performances may be assessed. All of these issues can be reached from what Lord and Maher propose. Their argument also suggests, as Jim Walsh observed, that knowledge structures which allow for the preservation and retrieval of experience constitute the cognitive capital of the firm. The richer and more accurate are the representations, the larger the cognitive capital. Both more differentiated systems of categories and more vigorous discussions are necessary to increase capital. Note that the development of new knowledge structures is not easy given the long feedback cycles in industry. Inference in the face of long delays between input and outcome is noisy at best. Ironically, shorter cycle times could improve inference and encourage more controlled processing, thereby increasing cognitive capital. Lord and Maher also make clear (e.g., p. 78) that we know far less about eventbased information processing than about person-based processing. We have a rich vocabulary of traits but when it comes to events, we flounder around with low-level labels such as “having a meeting.” If we want to assess leaders for their ability to impose structure, facilitate processes, and improve performance, then we need to do more than suggest that strong situations swamp personal dispositions. We must backstop that assertion with a set of believable, accessible, useful descriptors that provide situational prototypes which can serve as the basis for categories of place. Scholars of behavior settings, people like Wicker, Stokols, Schoggen and Kirmeyer, are people we need to listen to more carefully. Finally, the strongest contribution of this book-its in-depth probing of the mind of the follower-is also its most unsettling feature. Having become immersed in the argument that leadership is being seen as a leader, the reader is now haunted by the thought that maybe leadership is nothing but impression management. The grip of that possibility on one’s imagination is simply one more sign that Lord and Maher have written an important argument. To wrestle with that argument is to become re-energized around issues of leadership.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 1 am indebted in focus.
to my colleague Jim Walsh for discussions
which helped to put this book
Book Reviews
Nonetheless, it seems important to express our gratitude and to suggest, as we believe Ralph Stogdill might have wished, that the next edition be labeled simply The Handbook of L.eadership, 4th edition, and that its author be shown simply as Bernard M. Bass.
REFERENCES Bass, B.M. (1981). StogdiNS handbook of leadership: A survey of theory and research (rev. ed.). New York: Free Press. Bass, B.M. (1990). Bass & Stogdill’s handbook of leadership: Theory, research, & managerial applications (3rd ed.). New York: Free Press. Stogdill, R.M. (1974). Handbook of leadership: A survey of theory and research. New York: Free Press.
leadership
and Information
Processing: Linking Perceptions and Performance
by Robert C. Lord and Karen J. Maher Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991, 340 i- xi pages, cloth. Reviewed by Karl E. Weick, University
of Michigan-Ann
Arbor.
Lord and Maher define leadership as “the process of being perceived by others as a leader” (p. 11) and mate this definition with current research on cognition and information processing. The outcome suggests a promising way to shore up the waning influence of organizational behavior on organizational studies. The outcome also suggests that the life of a leader is much more complicated and iffy than merely living out a vision in public. Once one adopts the premise that to be a leader, one must be seen as a leader, several “golden-oldies” in the leadership field take on new meaning. For example, “leadership traits” now become concepts that say more about perceivers than they do about leaders. Traits are seen as schemas, knowledge structures, and sensemaking devices by which a perceiver begins to decide whether a flurry of assertive actions are evidence that one is watching an extrovert or a leader. This all looks pretty straightforward until Lord and Maher begin to partition this social-perceptual activity. The heart of their theory (chs. 2-4) involves the distinction between recognition-based perceptual processes (ch. 3) and inference-based perceptual processes (ch. 4). Recognition-based processes tend to be those which are dominated by categories, automatic processing, and implicit theories of leadership, all of which tend to be activated in face-to-face contacts at lower levels in the organization. Inferential processes tend to be those which are dominated by attributions, controlled processing, and inferences made from salient outcomes and events rather than from face-to-face contacts, all of which means these processes tend to be associated with perceptions of executive leadership. What makes these distinctions consequential is the difference between automatic and controlled processing. Existing knowledge structures such as scripts, prototypes,
110
LEADERSHIP
QUARTERLY
Vol. 4 No. 1 1993
categories, and implicit theories, are built up from experience, stored in long-term memory, and activated automatically. This automatic processing enables people to interpret, simplify, and integrate environmental information. The more readily observations are tied to these categories, the less the demand on short-term memory. Controlled processing, by contrast, involves serial, effortful, intentional information processing that places high demands on short-term working memory and interferes with other cognitive activities. To think carefully about causality is to use up cognitive resources quickly. The demanding nature of controlled processing means that it is used less often than is automatic processing. And when controlled processing is used, it is quickly overloaded. When these innocent propositions are combined, they suggest some novel predictions. For example, the process of image management in face-to-face contact may use up cognitive resources. If it does, then the person managing the impression may not have sufficient resources to gauge the impact of the presentation on a supervisor (p. 135). Thus, image management is precarious at best. As another example, charismatic leadership may be significant only when people use stereotypes and automatic processing to evaluate leaders. As observers use more controlled processing and pay more attention to analytic skills and effects on performance, the impact of charisma may decline (p. 222). The argument that knowledge structures determine whether an act will be coded as leadership or something else, puts some substance under Barnard’s oft-quoted but seldom documented assertion that leadership boils down to a silent vote in the trenches when a command is given. If the command matches the schema, leadership is reaffirmed and people move out of the trenches. If the command does not match, things get more dicey. One of the darker implications of the focus on follower schemas is that women may find it hard to be taken seriously as leaders. This is made clear in a stunning chapter, “Perceptions of Women in Management.” Terri L. Baumgardner is the lead author of this chapter with Lord and Maher as co-authors. Gender-related information processing occurs when females are in a minority in management positions and gender becomes salient as a basis for categorization. This has several consequences. Observers process what women do in terms of gender-related categories (e.g., friendliness, attractiveness, nurturing) rather than work-related categories (e.g., dependability, initiative, motivation). As a result, information related to management potential of women is neither encoded nor stored. It is simply ignored. When women are considered for promotion, evaluators have no clear assessment of their management potential because this judgment has not been made repeatedly nor has it been updated. Instead, actions have overwhelmingly been coded as feminine-unfeminine, not leadershipfollowership. Thus, females may be evaluated less accurately than males due to an automatic information process. The most foolproof way around this vicious circle (few woman at the top makes gender salient, which leads to more gender-related processing and less recall of workrelated successes, which leads to fewer women at the top) may be for women to act in ways which have immediate, direct effects from which people can infer capabilities for leadership (p. 112). Using a different image, one way out of gender-related processing may be through small wins, the creation of tangible, immediate, local, stand-alone achievements to which a woman is visibly and reliably attached.
Book Reviews
111
Lord and Maher argue that most existing leadership studies focus on automatic, faceto-face, recognition-based processes among lower management. That assertion lays out a marvelously inviting research agenda in terms of the gaps it identifies. Those gaps become self-evident as the book unfolds. As it moves from middle management to top management and from micro to macro levels of analysis, the argument is supported less by the innovative empirical work of Lord and his associates, and sounds more like a garden variety discussion of general management in the context of topics such as strategy, culture, succession, and power. There are several reasons why scholars of leadership should study this book. Most important, the book is an integrated introduction to Lord’s important and finely crafted work (33 of his studies ground the argument). This work is scattered throughout the literature, and it is not until its summary here that the implications for leadership become evident. This book clearly is the best description we have on the mind of the follower. As more researchers begin to invoke the imagery of sense-making and interpretation to describe organizational behavior, the ideas of Lord and Maher provide a plausible language to talk about these phenomena. Sense-making, for example, often represents a choice as to whether one will use a person-based (e.g., trait) or event-based (e.g., script) knowledge structure as a source of labels for an observed behavior. Since person-based structures are more automatic and more fully developed, they tend to dominate, which suggests why ieadership traits have had such a grip on leadership studies over the years and why the fundamental attribution error is so persistent. There are excellent discussions of on-line processing and updating of impressions, dyadic processes such as behavioral confirmation, and current work by people such as Walsh, Porac, Meindl, and Graen. Also, of course, there is the striking chapter on perceptual problems associated with women in management. There are parts of the argument, however, that seem to be less successful. These rough spots are wonderful because they force reflection on the question, does the problem lie with Lord and Maher or with the field? For example, the last half of the book makes extensive use of cusp catastrophe theory. This allows Lord and Maher to use a newer graphic to display the insights of Tushman and Romanelli, Miles and Snow, and Astley and Van de Ven. But the simple phrase, “incrementa change differs from discontinuous change,” captures the insights just as well and in less space. Furthermore, an increase on the abscissa of the cusp representation is more difficult to interpret than is a decrease. The authors repeatedly refer to “moving through the cusp” during periods of ascent, yet a literal tracing of movement on the graphic surface shows that there is a always a severe regression during periods of ascent. That is fascinating if intended, but it appears not to be. The authors avow an interest in “social perceptions” as early as chapter 5, but their treatment, like so much in social cognition, makes the phrase sound like a contradiction in terms. Social is equated with a superior-subordinate dyad, viewed largely from the side of the subordinate. “Shared” perspectives are posited without any discussion of how the sharing occurs. The possibility that schemas are the basis for distinctions between in-group and out-group identity is not considered. Nor do the authors reach the issue of how leaders view subordinates. Finally, there is the fascinating set of issues that flow from the large number of dichotomies that figure in Lord and Maher’s argument. Although I have missed some,
112
LEADERSHIP
QUARTERLY
Vol. 4 No. 1 1993
they argue that important distinctions include high/low cognitive load, person/ category-based processing, trait/event-based processing, convergent/ divergent periods, top down/ bottom up processing, automatic/ controlled processing, recognition/ inference, direct/ indirect influence, external/ internal focus, leader/ perceiver-oriented, evolutionary/ revolutionary, and executive/ middle/ bottom management. These are plausible ways to carve up a stream of events, but they also mirror the 2 X 2 mindset so common among experimentalists and the one concept per finding mindset of cognitive researchers. Lists of particulars such as those conveyed by Kahneman and Tversky, Nisbett and Ross, or Thaler are not much help until we move to higher-order concepts such as controlled/ automatic processing, mindful/mindless action, or procedural/ declarative memory. Lord and Maher have made an important advance by reducing the number of cognitive concepts into the workable 2 X 2 of recognition/inferential and automatic/controlled. The elegance and economy of this move, however, gets undermined when they are forced to retreat back to the lists for specific predictions based on ad hoc rationales. That this is the way they have to operate says more about the field than about them. The solid contribution that Lord and Maher have assembled provides a pretext to see more clearly other aspects of leadership. We wonder, for example, just what dors happen in face-to-face information processing? Daft and Lengel have argued that faceto-face contacts are rich communication media with high requisite variety. Yet, if social interaction makes high demands on information processing, people in face-to-face contact should rely more heavily on automatic processes and top-down processing such as prototype matching. If prototypes and stereotypes dominate face-to-face contact, then participants might think they are learning things when, in fact, they are not. Faceto-face contacts may be an increasingly impoverished medium, the more novel the other is and the more quickly the other uses up short-term memory. All of which may get us right back to the dilemma of women in management. We also begin to ask, could controlled information processing disappear from organizational life? If controlled processing is organized into prototypes which are then invoked during automatic processing, then how do knowledge structures get revised and when do we ever feel the need to do effortful, intentional information processing? Those moments of novel input when we are best able to revise the prototype, are also the most demanding, which triggers automatic processing and leaves us least likely to change the prototype. Theorists argue that high-velocity environments, the turn to globalization, and radical downsizing all force revolution, discontinuous change, and transformation. Fine, except that all this novelty overloads short-term working memory. And when short-term memory is overloaded, well-rehearsed automatic processing kicks in. The jolt of globalization forces people back onto ethnocentric certainties, not forward into new integrations. The glass ceiling, in times of discontinuity, will become harder to penetrate, not easier, as people resort to more gender-related processing. “Oldfashioned” implicit theories of leadership (e.g., leader as hero, Reagan?) will become stronger screens against which current claims of leadership are assessed. Thus, it should not be so surprising that we find ourselves going “back to the basics.” There is too much overload to allow much controlled processing. (This may be why we see renewed interest in Schneider and Schffrin’s (1977) contrast between automatic and controlled processing in the recent work of people like Sutton, Louis, Reger, Langer).
113
Book Reviews
The only way to deal with overload and create room for controlled processing may be through incremental change. Incremental change at least reduces demands on shortterm memory, even if it also repeatedly feels like too little, too late. Incremental changes allow people to focus on specifics, build categories from the bottom up, and think in terms of continua rather than dichotomies (pp. 31-33). Bottom-up processing under less cognitive load should produce some change in knowledge structures, which then enables the encoding of newer behaviors as the modified structure begins to be evoked more often with less effort. This suggests an agenda for leaders as well as a set of criteria against which their performances may be assessed. All of these issues can be reached from what Lord and Maher propose. Their argument also suggests, as Jim Walsh observed, that knowledge structures which allow for the preservation and retrieval of experience constitute the cognitive capital of the firm. The richer and more accurate are the representations, the larger the cognitive capital. Both more differentiated systems of categories and more vigorous discussions are necessary to increase capital. Note that the development of new knowledge structures is not easy given the long feedback cycles in industry. Inference in the face of long delays between input and outcome is noisy at best. Ironically, shorter cycle times could improve inference and encourage more controlled processing, thereby increasing cognitive capital. Lord and Maher also make clear (e.g., p. 78) that we know far less about eventbased information processing than about person-based processing. We have a rich vocabulary of traits but when it comes to events, we flounder around with low-level labels such as “having a meeting.” If we want to assess leaders for their ability to impose structure, facilitate processes, and improve performance, then we need to do more than suggest that strong situations swamp personal dispositions. We must backstop that assertion with a set of believable, accessible, useful descriptors that provide situational prototypes which can serve as the basis for categories of place. Scholars of behavior settings, people like Wicker, Stokols, Schoggen and Kirmeyer, are people we need to listen to more carefully. Finally, the strongest contribution of this book-its in-depth probing of the mind of the follower-is also its most unsettling feature. Having become immersed in the argument that leadership is being seen as a leader, the reader is now haunted by the thought that maybe leadership is nothing but impression management. The grip of that possibility on one’s imagination is simply one more sign that Lord and Maher have written an important argument. To wrestle with that argument is to become re-energized around issues of leadership.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 1 am indebted in focus.
to my colleague Jim Walsh for discussions
which helped to put this book