Organizational types and leadership roles

Scand. J. Mgmt. 15 (1999) 385}403

Organizational types and leadership roles Gunnar Grendstad!,*, Torodd Strand" ! Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Christies gt. 15, 5007 Bergen, Norway " Department of Administration and Organization Theory, University of Bergen, Christies gt. 15, 5007 Bergen, Norway Received January 1996; accepted November 1997

Abstract Certain managerial functions are necessary or of greater importance in certain organizations. The following relations between organization types and leadership roles are hypothesized: expert organizations and producers, bureaucratic organizations and administrators, group organizations and integrators, and task organizations and entrepreneurs. The analysis shows that striving for results and achieving goals (i.e. producer role) is a role requirement that appears in all types of organization, whereas integrating behavior was required as a secondary requirement, again in all four types of organization. It was also found that the union stewards overestimated their leaders' e$cacy as administrators and entrepreneurs, whereas the leaders themselves overestimated their own e$cacy as producers and integrators. The leader's length of service with the organization reduces the inclination towards the producer role, but is conducive to the role of administrator. ( 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Organizational types; Leadership; Roles

1. Introduction Leadership research and organization theory have taken separate paths in the years since the Second World War. In organization theory the concept of leadership has been left largely in limbo, whereas leadership theories and research have re#ected an overly optimistic ambition to explain organizational events by allegedly e!ective leadership traits and behaviors. The lack of organizational frames of reference and a limited set of (unitary) assumptions, based mainly on Western industrialized culture, have been conspicuous (House & Aditya, 1997). We will argue that leadership must be seen as a context-dependent phenomenon, and we would like to make

* Partly funded by the Norwegian Research Centre in Organization and Management. We thank two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. 0956-5221/99/$ - see front matter ( 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S 09 5 6-5 2 21 ( 9 8) 0 0 02 3 - 2

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Fig. 1. A typology of organizations and leadership roles.

a contribution to the understanding of ways in which leadership and organizational form may be related. What role do leaders assume in di!erent types of organization? Our overall research interest is to try to describe and explain patterns of leadership roles in organizations. Two questions are important in this study: how can organizational types be distinguished meaningfully and in a way which is theoretically relevant as well as empirically demonstrable, and how can leadership be understood as organizationally relevant, albeit not wholly determined activities in organizations? In our study we refer to four organizational types, i.e. the bureaucratic, expert, group and task organizations, and four leadership roles, i.e. producer, administrator, integrator and entrepreneur. Our basic hypothesis is that the relationship between type of organization and role of leadership is not random. More speci"cally we want to "nd out whether we can predict a role perception, given an organizational form. As role theory and functionalist-inspired organization theory together provide the underpinning for the present analysis, it is hypothesized that speci"c leadership roles will perform the particular function called for in each type of organization. We therefore expect to "nd a speci"c type of leadership role linked to a speci"c organizational type far more often than not (see Fig. 1). However, this general proposition has not been subjected to extensive testing. Although the concept of role has been used widely and applied loosely (Mintzberg, 1973), it has received little serious attention in leadership studies (Bryman, 1986). One exception is Pfe!er and Sanalcik (1975) which provides an extensive account of the roles, expectations and role performance of managers in a US university housing division. But their design does not allow for an explanation of role patterns as a function of organizational context. We believe that an empirical approach is

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necessary to test general assumptions about leadership as a context-dependent phenomenon, in which &&contexts'' are de"ned as organizational types. We o!er a fairly strict empirical analysis to test the speci"c assumption displayed in Fig. 1. Our aim in this article is thus to measure the relationship between organizational types and leadership role patterns in private Norwegian organizations.1 First, we construct two key dimensions for organizations: change as against stability, and internal as against external orientation. By squarely intersecting these two dimensions, we obtain four organizational types: expert organizations (stable and an external orientation), bureaucratic organizations (stable and an internal orientation), group organizations (change and an internal orientation) and task organizations (change and an external orientation). Second, we distinguish between four types of leadership role, indicated by the demands of the job as perceived by the CEO, and we link these to organizational types as follows: expert organizations and producers, bureaucratic organizations and administrators, group organizations and integrators, and task organizations and entrepreneurs. Third, we apply a slightly di!erent indicator of role, i.e. perceived e$cacy in performing each of the four roles, and compare the CEOs' perceptions with the accounts of the relevant union stewards on this point regarding their CEOs. Again we distribute the responses over four types of organization. Finally, we extend the analysis to include personal characteristics of the CEO and union steward in question, as well as organizational types, in our search for explanations of leadership role patterns.

2. Organization and leadership = an uncertain relationship 2.1. Leadership theory It has been argued that in the post-war period, leadership theory has been largely devoid of organizational frames of reference (Bryman, 1986; Strand, 1988). Considerable e!ort has been put into establishing universal patterns of personality traits and behaviors, referred to as leadership styles, to account for personal and organizational impact and success. Since the "eld has been dominated by psychological approaches, it has attracted strong criticism from scholars within sociology and political science (Pettigrew, 1987; Wildavsky, 1989). Despite the inclusion of contingency variables and increasing methodological rigor, questionable assumptions have continued to prevail (Bryman, 1996; House & Aditya, 1997). This criticism can be summarized in one conceptual and one structural argument. The conceptual argument simply claims that universally meaningful generalizations are not attainable due to a lack of any basic conceptual agreement or unifying theoretical direction. The structural or contingency argument claims that leadership

1 In this article we will use the concepts of leader, leadership, manager and CEO (Chief Executive O$cer) more or less interchangeably.

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explanations will be devoid of content if they fail to take account of the organizational and cultural context within which leadership is exercised. Explanations without reference to context are incompatible with social theory, which recognizes structures and other stable circumstances as frameworks for action and sense making. In contrast to the individualistic approach, organization theory still tends to disregard notions of powerful actors and assumes that structural variables explain it all (Pfe!er, 1978). Organization theory also argues that the selection of leaders in any particular organization is so biased in favor of the present system that only the tiniest variance can be explained by &&leadership'' (March & March, 1977). In attempts to reconcile the polarized explanatory positions of the leader and the context, three postions, all of which are paraphrases of the classical approach which links actors and structures, have been adopted. According to one position the psychological traits of the individual managers and the structural properties are explored, and the relative e$cacy of, for example, the leader's risk orientation in di!erent types of organization are measured (Miller, Kets De Vries & Toulouse, 1982; Miller & Toulouse, 1986). Another position assumes that certain functional requirements within an organization predispose leaders to meet those particular requirements (Adizes, 1979; Mintzberg, 1979), or the existence of some invariant pattern between organizational forms and leadership forms is assumed (Chandler, 1962; Wildavsky, 1989). In his seminal work about the growth and modernization of American industrial enterprises, for example, Chandler (1962) states that over time chief executives in American corporations have shifted their orientation and their role away from internal orientation, control and technical matters and towards external orientation and strategic matters, as the growth and divisionalization of their organizations required. A third position starts with an inventory of the possible roles that leaders can adopt and maps the roles empirically over various types of organization. The role expectations of other relevant actors or constituencies, for example the union representative, can also be mapped. The weak hypothesis behind such a strategy is that the relations between role perceptions and organizational forms are not random. The strong hypothesis forces us to predict a role perception, given an organizational form. This strategy also recognizes the dynamics between actors and structures, transitional processes and contradictory role requirements, thus allowing room for personal and situational variations in role perception and performance (Tsui, 1984; Gammelsvter, 1986). However, the range of possible leadership roles has to be determined both theoretically and practically. A good starting point is to explore assumptions common among theorists about the basic functions required for organizations to survive, and the social roles required to uphold those functions. Even a short list must include the following requirements: attending to the organization's goals, standards and achievements; creating and upholding structures and systems; integrating various views and interests and purporting coherence; and "nally attending to the threats and opportunities in the environment of the particular organization. These are ideas which stem from Parsonian sociology (i.e. AGIL-functions) and can be identi"ed in a large number of suggestive and applicable theories, such as Belbin's theories about the

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spectra of team roles (1981); they are also suggested by March, for example, in describing what has to be done to keep an organization going (1982). Theoretical and empirical re"nement has been o!ered in Quinn (1988), where eight reqirements, portrayed as pairwise competing values, are suggested. The values, and hence organizational roles, can be grouped into four quadrants. Adizes (1979) has provided a popular version of the basic framework and has supplied metaphorical labels for the functions and roles to be applied here. Several others have applied the framwork in empirical work, for example in examining how the various roles are undertaken in the public or private organizational context (e.g. Metcalf & Richards, 1990; Strand, 1987, 1993) and how a particular function and role, such as integration by way of personnel management, is performed (or neglected) (Yntema, 1990). The empirical indication of the role content consists of pattern of norms relating to an incumbent as reported by him or her or by signi"cant others in the role set. All these three positions have their merits, and are not mutually exclusive. The present study, however, will be based on the third approach, taking a number of predetermined roles and mapping them over the established range of organizational types. The number of possible leadership roles will be limited to four; namely producer, administrator, integrator and entrepreneur, which re#ects the widespread agreement among scholars about the basic functions identi"able in any organization (see Fig. 1). The measurement of roles re#ects the rather ambiguous de"nition of the concept, i.e. the individual incumbent's account of their own attention and orientation, their perception of the expectations or demands to which the role is subject, their perception of their own performance e$cacy and the perception of their role performance by signi"cant others. 2.2. Dimensions demarcating organizational types There is no general agreement in organization theory about what constitutes the basic dimensions for organizations, or how organizations can be classi"ed. The distinctions between mechanical and organic types and between bureaucracies and less hierarchical or non-hierarchical organizations have been with us for a long time, but they o!er only a crude version. A popular typology invented by Mintzberg (1979) portrays "ve structural types, which are valuable as visual illustrations and intuitively recognizable forms, but do not do much to clarify any common analytical dimensions. The so-called Aston studies, based on extensive empirical material (Donaldson, 1986) suggested "ve dimensions, which were later collapsed to three: (1) the structuring of activities through specialization, standardization and formalization; (2) the concentration of authority; and (3) line control of the work#ow, e.g. the strength and formalization of personnel policies. This sort of classi"cation directs attention to questions of internal control and structure, and suggests separate dimensions. But it fails to address explicitly another signi"cant organizational issue: how the relationship with the external environment is re#ected in the organization, and how externally induced change is dealt with. Organizational form and managerial tasks are both dependent on characteristics of the organizational environment (Thompson, 1967; Pfe!er & Salancik, 1978) a fact of

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which the Aston scholars are well aware but without including it as an explicit analytical dimension. We want to retain measures of di!erentiation and formalization, and to add measures of internal/external orientation to our analytical scheme, as we consider the degree of external orientation and exchange as indicative of dependencies, opportunities and the functional role requirements of managers. Essentially, we take the three Aston variables which we expect to tap one key dimension only, and let them represent the degree of formal order in an organization. We can regard this as a tight}loose dimension, or translate it into a dimension of stability and change. The more the formalization, the less the propensity to change, which means fewer demands and opportunities for the leaders to attend to questions of control and formal order rather than search and transformation. We add the internal}external dimension which is represented by measures of competition and exchange with the external environment. The two dimensions provide the basis for a crude but theoretically relevant classi"cation of organizations. This determines whether they are formalized to a greater or lesser extent, and hence are more or less amenable to change; also whether they are more or less prone to exchange with their environment with all the related dependencies, opportunities and possible demands on managers to negotiate external relations, rather than attending to internal matters. This reasoning tallies with the Parsonian scheme mentioned above and re#ects the taxonomy of organizational challenges presented in Quinn (1988). We use these dimensions to establish four types of organizations. Miner (1993) has suggested a typology which re#ects our concern for establishing basic dimensions, as well as highlighting the role of the leaders and their motivational patterns: task, group, hierarchical (or bureaucratic) and professional (or expert) organizations. These organizations can be described as prototypes, each of which parsimoniously represents common types of organization. Composite types can be observed, but few organizations di!er signi"cantly from these prototypes. Although Miner is not explicit about the exact de"nition of the underlying dimensions, his typology seems appropriate for testing the relationship between organizational form and leadership roles. However, the typology also "ts the combination of organizational dimensions suggested above, in which each type also invokes associated features: Miner (1993) argues that each type requires certain leadership forms as well as motivational patterns. A similar line of reasoning has been introduced by Quinn (1988). Role theory combined with functionalist-inspired organization theory thus provides the underpinning of the present analysis. Certain functions are hypothesised as being necessary, or of greater importance, in certain organizations. For example, we expect that in hierarchies such as bureaucratic organizations, coordination by rules is required and that this is expressed in the leadership roles, while the establishment of collective norms will be called for in group organizations. Thus, speci"c leadership roles are expected to perform the particular function required in di!erent types of organization. However, this general proposition has not been subjected to extensive testing. Miner (1993), for example, simply assumes the relationship and then proceeds to identify and test the motivational correlates in di!erent situations. Most empirical studies which address the question of the relation between organizational types and leadership roles, compare the private and public sectors (i.e. Boyatzis, 1982;

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Kurke & Aldrich, 1983). Strand (1993) distinguishes between private and public bureaucracies and between public and private non-bureaucratic organizations. He "nds that managers in all four types of organization perceive the need to motivate and support people (to &&integrate'' in our terminology) as the chief demand required of their position, and that the role requirements in public bureaucracies, where control and rule-following were initially more predominant than in other organizations, tended over time to share more of the pro"le of other types of organization. Role pro"les were not unrelated to organizational environment, but were not determined according to any clear-cut pattern. Nvss and Strand (1993) have established di!erences between leadership roles in private, municipal and state (national) organizations, and found that the contrast between municipal leaders and state leaders was the most conspicuous.2 They found that leaders in private organizations pay attention primarily to demands concering the achievement of goals, whereas municipal leaders emphasize integration more stongly. The size of the organization and the number of years the leader has spent with it are further factors which di!erentiate between role pro"les. We will now proceed to describe and explain patterns of leadership roles in organizations. We will construct empirically the theoretical dimensions of change/ stability and internal/external orientation, from which our four types of organizations have been deduced. Next, we will combine these organizational types with preferred leadership roles. We expect our empirical "ndings to support the theoretical relationship depicted in Fig. 1.

3. Analyses 3.1. Measuring organizational dimensions3 The choice of the six variables we have selected to tap the two dimensions change/stability and internal/external orientation has been motivated in the above discussion (see the Appendix for details of the variables). Organizational levels, specialization and personnel manager are the variables intended to measure the structuration of activities by means of specialization, increased formalization of personnel policies, standardization and concentration of authority * or, in short, the stability/change dimension. Trading, competition and rate of competition, on the other hand, are intended to measure the degree to which organizations operate in an environment that makes demands upon them or in an environment which is so

2 The data used in Nvss and Strand (1993) is partly identical to that used here. 3 We employed data from the 1989 Norwegian &&Labor and Organization Surveys''. One questionnaire was on the Chief Executive O$cers (CEO) (N"1010). Due to the design of the survey, not all the organizations in the original version received identical sets of questions. Only private organizations exceeding 15 employees can therefore be included in the present study. The surveys were administrated by the Norwegian Bureau of Statistics. The Norwegian Social Science Data Services supplied the data, but this institution is not responsible for the analyses or the results.

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insigni"cant that the organization can attend almost exclusively to internal matters * or in short, the internal/external orientation dimension. Organizational levels. The CEO was asked to indicate the four organizational levels at which 11 speci"c decisions had to be made: at the superordinate level of the board or the owners, at the level of the CEO, at the level immediately below the CEO, or at any other lower level in the organization. By counting the number of levels at which organizational decision-making takes place, we also get an indication of the number of organizational levels, since the number of decision-making levels cannot exceed the number of organizational levels. Consequently, we were interested in knowing the number of decision-making levels in each organization, regardless of how many decisions each individual organization made at any one level. Specialization. Here the CEO was asked whether at least one person was fully employed on any of 12 di!erent tasks covering various organizational functions. These questions measure the range of di!erentiation and specialization within an organization. This variable comprises the number of a$rmative answers across all the 12 questions. Personnel manager. A separate question in the survey established whether the organization had any individual person more or less primarily employed as personnel manager. This question also measures the degree of specialization within an organization. ¹rading. An organization attends to internal matters more if it does not deal or trade with other organizations. Inversely, an organization has to take heed of external matters, if it deals or trades with others. One question in the survey asked whether the organization supplies (&&exports'') commodities to other organizations, while another asked whether it receives (&&imports'') commodities from other organizations. These two questions measure the degree of external orientation, and are combined in the subcontracting variable. Competition. Similarly, an organization must also pay heed to external matters, if it competes with other organizations. Two questions measure the domestic and international competition that an organization faces, as reported by the CEO. These two questions are combined in the competition variable. Increase in competition. An external focus is also related to increasing competition, i.e. whether or not the competition is thought to have become tougher. If there is no competition at all, an organization is likely to have a predominantly internal orientation. Two questions in the survey ask whether the domestic and/or international competition facing an organization has increased, has remained constant or has decreased during the past year. We combine the questions on the domestic and international competition into one variable. To measure the degree to which we can identify the external/internal and the stability/change dimensions by means of these six variables, we cast them all into a factor analysis (Kim & Mueller 1978a, 1987b).4 Table 1 shows that all the 4 We also tested a range of other variables that might pertain to the two dimensions, but we did not include any of these in our analysis, either because they did not comply with our theoretical expectations, or because they turned out to be at odds with the variables we have identi"ed for our present purpose.

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Table 1 Stability and external orientation. Factor analysis

Competition Increase in compeition Trading Personel manager Specialization Organizational levels

External

Stability

0.95 0.95 0.38 0.05 0.12 0.04

0.01 !0.01 0.14 0.81 0.79 0.67

Note: The factor analysis requested two factors accounting for 61.3% of common variance (principal component, varimax rotation) (N"323). Data source: Norwegian social science data service &&Labor and Organization Surveys 1989''.

variables load signi"cantly on two distinct dimensions: the three variables which are assumed to tap the external/internal dimension load on the "rst factor, while the three variables assumed to tap the change/stability dimension load on the second factor.5 These two dimensions were saved as factor scores. When we squarely intersect the two dimensions, we obtain four property spaces, or categories. These categories are the four organizational types discussed above, which we use to classify the organizations included in the survey. Two corollaries to this analysis should be observed. When we intersect two factorized dimensions orthogonally at their means, the 323 organizations in the analysis become evenly distributed over the four organizational types derived from the dimensions. Further, when we measure the degree of specialization along the stability/change dimension, we also obliquely measure the size of the organization. We "nd the highest number of employees in expert and bureaucratic organizations, both of which share the dimensional attribute of stability.6 3.2. Leadership roles The survey presented four leadership roles. The CEOs should report which of the two demands of the role were most and second most important in the leadership position (see Table 2). The table shows scant variation in the perceived demands as between the organizational types. In general, the role of producer is considered to be the most important in the job, while the role of integrator comes second. Entrepreneur and administrator are rarely regarded as important roles on either the "rst or second priority. 5 The rule of thumb for assessing the statistical signi"cance of factor loadings is 0.30 (Hair, Anderson, Tatham & Black, 1995: 384f). 6 The proportion of organizations and their mean number of employees within each type are as follows: expert 24% and 299 employees, bureaucratic 18% and 224 employees, group 25% and 71 employees, and task 33% and 43 employees.

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Table 2 Leadership roles, "rst and second priority, by organizational types. Per cent Leadership roles, 1st and 2nd priority

Organizational type:

Total

Expert

Bureaucracy

Group

Task

Procedure: Incite e!orts to achieve results and goal ful"llment

1 2

76 17

62 25

64 25

64 24

66 23

Administrator: See to it that rules and systems operate well and that they are complied with in the organization

1 2

1 19

2 16

3 16

4 10

3 15

1 2

18 58

26 44

26 52

25 52

24 52

1 2

5 6

10 16

8 8

8 14

8 11

25

18

24

33

100

Integrator: Support, development and motivate personal Enterpreneur: Develop new products or services for the organization in order to reach new customer groups

Data source: Norwegian social science data service, &&Labor and Organization Survey 1989''; N"317. Analyses of "rst and second priority are Chi-square signi"cant at 0.80 and 0.33, respectively.

Our theoretical framework lead us to predict that certain leadership roles will be more frequent in some organizations than in others (see Fig. 1). But the empirical distribution of the leadership role, as indicated by the most important perceived demands, over organizational types does not comply with our theoretical expectations. Whereas we had expected systematic variations, the invariance of the responses across organizational types is striking. That the role of producer appears most frequently in expert organizations and, by a very close call, the role of integrator most frequently in group organizations, simply re#ects the general pattern of leadership roles. The increases at second-priority level of the entrepreneur role in task organizations, the integrator role in group organizations and administrator role in bureaucratic organizations, are not signi"cant either in isolation or in comparison with other priorities. The increases are a consequence of the overwhelming choice of the role of producer as "rst priority. The predominant choice of producer as the leadership role in most demand may stem from a sector e+ect, as only private organizations with more than 15 employees were included in the data. We know from other analyses of the 1989 survey, which included public organizations and quite small organizations as well, that the role of integrator is preferred more frequently (Strand, 1993). Our hypothesis, then, is that the leaders of large private organizations may give priority to the role of producer as a result of their education, because of peer pressure or of a general ideology among private organizations.

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Table 3 Mirror images of leadership e$cacy by organizational types, percent Leadership Organizational type e$cacy through role of Expert Bureaucracy

Producer Administrator Integrator Entrepreneur

Group

Task

Total

CEO US Di! CEO US Di! CEO US Di! CEO US Di! CEO US

Di!

53 0 28 6

No contribution 13 N

43 10 57 25 !25 2 6 22 19 25 !19 9 2

11 13 53

26 13 11 34

31 45 !11 5 8 16 !25 11

17

!4 24 47

42 3 53 16 !11 2 13 3 13 24 !13 13 5

19 19 38

45 8 8 34

8 52 !6 2 !5 19 !21 9

39 15 9 29

14 !13 10 !20

6

13 17 53

7

10 192

Note: CEO"Chief Executive O$cer; US"Union Steward. Column percentages may deviate from 100 due to rounding procedures. Data source: Norwegian social science data services, &&Labor and Organization Surveys 1989''. N"192 (Columnwise from left to right, analyses are Chi-square signi"cant at 0.74, 0.04, 0.11, 0.44 and 0.03 levels respectively)

3.3. Mirror images of leadership ezcacy In this section we modify our organization/leadership hypothesis in two ways. First, as the organizational goal depends on the type of organization in question, we include a question on the perceived e.cacy of a leadership role: what is the role through which the leader has made a substantial contribution, if any, to the organization's bottom line in the last 12 months? The modi"ed hypothesis then runs as follows: the perception of an e$cacious leadership role depends upon the type of organization in which the leader is operating. Second, we compare the CEOs' answers on e$cacy with those o!ered by the Union Steward of the organization.7 This allows us to study the degree to which organizational type a!ects the perceived e$cacy of two key actors in an organization. And it also allows us to check the extent to which the stewards underestimate or overestimate the perceived contribution to the organizations's bottom line as

7 Another questionnaire from the 1989 &&Labor and Organization Surveys'' was adminstered to union representatives (UR) in each of the organizations (N"1215). The UR "le was matched with the CEO "le according to their common organization. As some organizations had more than one UR for every CEO, we classi"ed the UR in each organization by his or her status, board membership and hours of union commitment in the organization in order to match the CEO with the UR on a one-to-one basis. This enabled us to consistently match the CEO with the highest ranked union representative within each organization, hereafter referred to as the union steward.

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reported by the CEO himself. Table 3 presents the mirror images of leadership e$cacy.8 More than half the CEOs and two out of "ve union stewards refer to the producer role as the one through which the CEO contributes most to the organization's bottom line. In the case of the CEO this echoes the response reported in the previous section where the producer role was the role most often demanded for in the job (see Table 2). Thus, the leadership role perceived as the top requirement in a leader also re#ects the most e$cacious leader role. But compared to the stewards, the CEOs overestimate their own e$cacy in achieving explicit results and particualr goals. Almost one out of "ve leaders identi"es the role of integrator as the one in which they are most e$cacious, whereas barely one out of ten stewards shares this view. Again, the CEO overestimates his own e$cacy as a &&nursing'' leader who supports and motivates the sta!. Less than 2% of the CEOs report e$cacious leadership as being exercised in the administrative role of maintaining and complying with the system. In this respect, however, the union stewards overestimate the e$cacy of their leaders as administrators (15%). Almost one out of ten leaders reports the role of entrepreneur as the one from which the organization pro"ts most. In contrast, almost three out of ten union stewards perceive e$cacy on this count, which inclines them to overestimate the role of e$cacious entrepreneurial leadership. The CEOs are more pessimistic about their own contribution to the organization: 17% of the leaders report that they have not contributed to the bottom line of their organizations. The union stewards are less pessimistic, since only 7% perceive no contribution from the leader in this respect. We "nd only organizational e!ects on leadership e$cacy as perceived by the union stewards: the e$cacy of the producer, the integrator and the entrepreneur increases in the expert, the group, and the task organizations respectively.9 These leader/organization relationships comply with our theoretical expectations. In bureaucracies, however, the stewards actually regard the entrepreneurial role as the primary contribution of the CEOs, but the CEOs themselves rarely share this view. They rank the demands of their role and their perceived contributions to the organization on this count in the lower part of the list. One possible interpretation of this is that the stewards, and possibly other rank and "le members of the organization too, see the CEO as the procurer of security in face of risky situations and the innovator in face of challenge. It should also be noted that there is a substantially higher frequency of &&no contribution'' reports from the CEOs than from the stewards in group organizations. This may be due to the uncertain status and lack of instrumental measures for managers in such organizations, while the stewards may anyway attribute e$cacy to the CEO's rank and power. 8 There were "ve response options. The "rst option was that the leader had not made any contribution at all, while the four remaining options were linked to the leadership roles of entrepreneur, producer, integrator and adminstrator. For the union steward, this variable was framed within one question, whereas for the leader it was framed within two questions. We recoded the two di!erent questions into the format presented here. 9 There are too few cases pertaining to the role of adminstrator to pursue analyses on this point.

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We have observed organizational e!ects on perceived leadership e$cacy among the stewards but not among the CEOs. Our "ndings indicate that factors other than the organizational determine the CEOs' perception of their own role. The general pattern that emerges is that the CEOs understand their roles in terms of acting with a view to achieving goals and results, and of motivating, supporting and enabling subordinates. Union stewards only partly agree: although they frequently consider their CEO to be contributing to the achievement of goals, they play down this part of the role as well as the role of integrator emphasizing instead the role of entrepreneur and the role as defender of rules and systems. Thus, leadership roles seem to evade unambiguous descriptions: depending on the viewpoint, leadership roles are perceived as containing goal achievement and social integration, or system maintainance and innovation. Whereas the CEOs' use verbs with an open meaning in their descriptions, e.g. &&pursuing goals'', &&motivating people'', union stewards see leadership roles as concerned with speci"cs such as rules and systems and the development of new products. These two pairs of role perceptions do not correlate directly with the basic internal/external orientation and stability/change dimensions. The CEOs overestimate the producer and integrator roles, which theoretically fall along the diagonal between group and expert organizations. The stewards, on the other hand, overestimate the administrator and entrepreneur roles which theoretically fall along the diagonal running between bureaucracy and task organizations. Thus the stewards generally tend to attribute more internal and external &&system contributions'' to the CEOs than the CEOs attribute to themselves. The CEOs de"ne themselves as doers and informal integrators to a far greater extent than the stewards perceive them as being. 4. Explaining leadership roles In this "nal section, we expand our analysis of what can explain leadership role. We analyze the way in which organizational types, attributes of the union stewards and attributes of the leaders themselves can account statistically for perceptions of the demands on leaders, i.e. leadership roles. We recode the four organizational types into dummy variables and employ them as independent variables; we exclude the organizational type that theoretically pertains to the particular leadership role we are seeking to explain, in order to analyse deviations from the theoretical assumptions. We also record whether or not the leader has reported the importance of a given leadership role on either "rst or second priority: the four dependent variables are therefore dichotomous, measuring the presence or absence of the leadership role in question.10 Table 4 shows the results of the regression analyses. 10 The orthodox alternative to the present OLS-regression is logistic regression. Although the distribution of three of the four dependent variables fall outside the conventional 0.20}0.80 range where replicates logistic regression unproblematically (the means for the four variables are: producer 0.90; administrator 0.18; integrator 0.75; and entrepreneur 0.14), recent research has convincingly demonstrated that logistic regression does not perform signi"cantly better than OLS regression, even in the presence of skewed distributions (Franklin & RuK dig, 1995). We also favour OLS-regression because of the straightforwardness of the intepretation of its coe$cients.

0.03 0.01

!0.13 !0.04 0.07

0.07 0.04

0.19! !0.08

!0.14 !0.04 0.07

0.13 0.06

!0.11

0.03 0.14 0.07

0.09 0.33!

0.14 !0.14

0.06 0.02

0.15

0.11 !0.33!

0.06 0.03

0.16! !0.09

0.02 0.03

0.17

0.04 !0.01 0.05 0.10

0.02 0.00

0.02 0.02

0.17

0.20 0.11 !0.04 0.21

0.17! !0.13

!0.12 !0.03 0.07

Administrator

0.00 !0.02

0.03

0.02 0.00

Integrator

0.07 0.04

!0.26! 0.06

0.03

0.03 0.02

0.10 0.03

!0.04

!0.15 !0)06

0.03 !0.02 0.04 !0.19

!0.25! 0.10

0.03 0.02

0.04 !0.10 0.01 0.11 !0.06 0.06

0.04 0.00

!0.02 0.00

!0.10 0.11 !0.06

Entrepreneur

0.09 0.01

0)16

!0.15 !0.18

!0.09 0.11 !0.11 !0.08

!0.04 0.02

!0.06 0.15 !0.10

Data source: Norwegian social science data service, &&Labor and Organization Surveys 1989''; (!sig. at 0.05-level), N"163, listwise deletion of missing cases.

R2 Adjusted R2

¸eader Age Sex Educational level Education: engineer Education: social scientist Length of time in organization Length of time in CEO position

;nion Steward Age Sex

Organization type Expert Bureaucracy Group Task

Producer

Table 4 Explaining leadership roles, Blockwise regression, beta coe$cients

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399

CEOs tend to de-emphasize the producer role (i.e. &&incite e!orts to achieve results and certain goals'') when they "nd themselves in bureaucratic organizations. CEOs tend to give greater emphasis to the producer role if the union steward is older than average and female. The leader also reports the presence of this role if he himself is a male of some years, is an engineer by education and has not been long with the organization. CEOs tend to report the administrator role (i.e. &&see to it that rules and systems operate well and that they are complied with in the organization'') when the leader "nds himself in an expert organization, when the steward is elderly and female; this applies more, the longer the CEO has been in the organization but without having been long in the leadership position. The best predictor of the CEOs' reporting the integrator role (i.e. &&support, develop and motivate co-workers'') is that the steward is a younger man. CEOs tend not to report the integrator role when they are either engineer or social scientists by education. CEOs tend to emphasize the role of entrepreneur (i.e. &&develop new products or services for the organization in order to reach new customer groups'') when they "nd themselves in bureaucratic organizations. CEOs are more likely to report this role the longer they have held their positions and the shorter their time in the organization, and if their education is low on all counts. Explained variance across the regression analyses is relatively low, not exceeding 14%, and most of the coe$cients are statistically insigni"cant at the 0.05-level which stems primarily from the low N.

5. Discussion We set out to analyze the relationship between four organizational types and four leadership roles, each of which last were assumed to be particularly relevant to one of the four types of organizations. The analyses, based on a set of unusual and promising data from Norwegian organizations, have yielded few conclusive results. Leadership roles, as de"ned by the incumbents, were not found to be systematically related to organizational forms, as we have measured them here. The call to strive for results and the achievement of goals appeared strongly as a role requirement in all types of private organizations, be they bureaucracies, expert organizations, group organizations or task organizations. Similarly, integrating behavior was called for as a second type of demand in all types of organization. The results di!er somewhat from earlier "ndings reported by Nvss (1992) and Strand (1993), where the integrator role was found to be most often called for. In those studies, however, smaller organizations and public organizations were both included as well. Also, a fairly uniform pattern emerged across organizational types and sectors, in the sense that the di!erences between the organizational types were marginal albeit signi"cant. Two hypotheses can be put forward as alternatives to the &&organization-determinesrole'' hypothesis. First, our questions may have struck a common cultural chord regarding leadership; at one level there seem to be common, national conceptions

400

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as to what is required of leaders, regardless of organizational context. Lord and Maher (1991) have suggested that three di!erent levels of leadership expressions should be distinguished: the superordinate, i.e. the general cultural or national, level; the organizational, i.e. the level of organization or sector for which the speci"c behavior is relevant; and the basic level, referring to any speci"c workplace. Our data may not tap the demands of the leader role or the tasks speci"ed for the particular circumstances associated with the organizational type. Since public organizations are excluded from our sample, and certain di!erences between sectors have been established previously (Nvss & Strand, 1993), we are reluctant to o!er "rm conclusions as to the general applicability of our "ndings. More research with alternative indicators which are also more site-speci"c is called for, to support or reject our basic hypothesis. Second, leadership studies can perhaps be perceived as a language game (Pondy, 1978). There are certain &&buzz-words'' which at any given time will make leaders respond positively. The preference for integration functions among participants in management development courses, and the increasing uniformity in responses over time indicate that leaders' responses are not unrelated to what is currently &&managerially correct''. In our sample &&results'' and &&goal achievement'' may have served as such triggers to a positive response. The uniformity repeats itself in the CEOs' perception of their own e$cacy, in which the di!erences between managers across di!erent organizations are insigni"cant. However, the stewards' perceptions of their CEOs' e$cacy partly conform to the hypothesis. But it is perhaps in the analysis of discrepancies between the perceptions of the CEOs and stewards that the most enticing possibilites lie (see Grendstad & Strand, 1995), particularly with reference to bureaucracies and expert organizations where there is little agreement as to what the CEOs contribute to their organizations. The attempt to explain role pro"les/inclinations with the help of biographical variables yielded few signi"cant results. However, the CEO's length of time in the organization reduces the inclination towards the producer role and increases the frequency of administrators. The most challenging implication of the study is perhaps the recognition * and empirical indication * of the way leadership to some extent is detached from the functional requirements stated in our theory, and that managers may perform in accordance with general normative demands and combinations of demands unfull"lled in a particular organization. Hence, the observation by the stewards that managers in bureaucratic organizations often perform entrepreneurial functions, performing over and above &&the established routines and formal requirements''. Finally, we would like to add two comments to this analysis. First, the deducing of organizational types from prescribed dimensions may not allow su$cient #exibility. Alternative operationalizations, additional dimensions and/or alternative methods may be required. Since a greater amount of variance has been discerned when using formal institutional distinctions (albeit in some cases with uncertain theoretical justi"cation), there is reason to suspect that our measures could be improved. Measures of dependencies and of exchanges other than formal delivery contracts about goods, should be considered.

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401

Secondly, leadership is an evasive phenomenon, one that is highly context-dependent and di$cult to grasp by rigorous statistical measures. Ideas about four roles captured by two dimensions may be too parsimonious. An alternative could be to test several operationalizations. The literature o!ers an array of lists (e.g. traits, styles, behaviors, roles) as de"nitions or descriptors of leadership. Yet the very complexity of such descriptors, and their uncertain theoretical basis, make them di$cult to apply. One reason for the uncertain results may lie in the nature of leadership and organization themselves. Leadership is much more than the mechanical compliance with organizationally de"ned procedures. Roles are ambiguous, shifting and contradictory, as well as loosely coupled to other organizational processes. Neither managers nor others necessarily possess an unambiguous understanding of what they are doing or a clear language for expressing it. Further, what they may actually be doing is not built on what the organization itself naturally does, but rather &&"lling in'' gaps arising from particular circumstances or counteracting de"ciencies in organizational mechanisms and procedures.

Appendix A. Variables Indexes of organizational dimensions Organizational level: 1"one level, 24"four levels. Specialization: 0"no specialization, 2 12"high degree of specialization. Personnel manager: 0"no &&personnel manager'', 1"&&personnel manager''. ¹rading: 2"exports and imports, 1"exports or imports, 0"neither exports nor imports. Competition: This variable runs from 6 (strong domestic and international competition) to 2 (no competition). We obtain this index by adding the domestic and international competition indicators, each of which include the following scores: 3"Strong domestic/international competition, 2"weak domestic/international competition, 1"no competition or not relevant. Increase in competition: This variable runs from 6 (increasing domestic and international competition) to 2 (decreasing or no competition). We also obtain this index by adding the domestic and international indicators of the competition, each of which consists of the following scores: 3"increasing domestic/international competition, 2"constant domestic/international competition, 1"decreasing or no competition. Regression analyses Dependent variables Producer: Demanded on 1. or 2 priority "1, other "0. Administrator: Demanded on 1. or 2 priority "1, other "0. Integrator: Demanded on 1. or 2 priority "1, other "0. Entrepreneur: Demanded on 1. or 2 priority "1, other "0.

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Independent variables Organizational type Bureacracy: coded 1, other coded 0. Expert: coded 1, other coded 0. Group: coded 1, other coded 0. ¹ask: coded 1, other coded 0. ;nion steward Age: the age of union steward. Sex: 0"woman, 1"man. ¸eader Age: the age of the leader. Sex: 0"woman, 1"man. Educational level: 3"high school basic level, 4"high school secondary level, 5"university lower level, 6"university intermediate level, 7"university higher level, 8" ph.d or equivalent. Engineer: coded 1, other education coded 0. Social scientist: coded 1, other education coded 0. ¸ength of time in organization: years of employment in organization. ¸ength of time in position: years in the present CEO position. Note: Engineering comprises here the educational "elds of manufacturing industry, craft, technology and science, whereas social science refers here to the educational "elds of administration, economics, social science and jurisprudence. It was not possible to discriminate within or signi"cantly beyond these two categories. References Adizes, I. (1979). How to solve the mismanagement crisis. Santa Monica: Dow Jones, Irwin. Belbin, R. M. (1981). Management teams. =hy they succeed or fail. London: Heinemann. Boyatzis, R. (1982). ¹he Competent Manager. New York: Wiley. Bryman, A. (1986). ¸eadership and Organizations. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Chandler, A. D. Jr. (1962). Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Donaldson, L. (1986). Research Note: The Interaction of Size and Diversi"cation as a Determinant of Divisionalization * Grinyer revisited. Organization Studies, 7(4), 367}379. Franklin, M. N., & RuK dig, W. (1995). On the durability of Green Politics. Evidence from the 1989 European Election Study. Comparative Political Studies, 28(3), 409}439. Gammelsvter, H., ¸edelse i store desentraliserte organisasjoner. Bergen: LOS-senteret, 1986. Grendstad, G., & Strand, T. (1995) Mirror images of organization: the chief executive o.cer vs the union representative. Mimeo. Hair, J. J. Jr., Anderson, R. E., Tatham, R. L., & Black, W. C. (1995). Multivariate data analysis with readings. Englewood Cli!s, NJ: Prentice-Hall. House, R. J., & Aditya, R. N. (1997). The social scienti"c study of leadership: Quo vadis? Journal of Manangement, 23(3), 409}473. Kim, J.-O., & Mueller, C. W. (1978a). Introduction to Factor Analysis. What it is and how to do it. In Quantitative applications in the social sciences (Vol. 13). London: Sage University Press. Kim, J.-O., & Mueller, C. W. (1978b). Factor analysis. Statistical methods and practical issues. In Quantitative applications in the social sciences (Vol. 14). London: Sage University Press.

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