Creating and Sustaining Positive Organizations

By Ryan W. Quinn

Last week I attended the annual conference of the Academy of Management. One of the sessions I attended focused on positive organizational scholarship. I sat at a table discussing “positive leadership.” One of the people at this table was a colleague of mine named Mark Krieger, who had interviewed Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford Motor Company.

In the interview, Mr. Mulally said many positive things about empowering employees, the importance of vision, and what it means to be a positive leader. Mark came away from this interview deeply impressed with the man who was running “the only American auto company that got through the financial crisis without needing a bailout.” He and his colleague, Prasad Kaipa, wrote up their interview and submitted it for publication in the Journal of Management Inquiry. However, before it got published, the people who reviewed the manuscript that Kaipa and Krieger submitted required them to do some editing to remove parts of the manuscript that they found a little too unbelievable.

Krieger seemed a little disturbed by this experience as he related it to us. He wondered what kind of economy or society we might be creating for ourselves if we refuse to believe in the good intent and successful actions of leaders who really do seem to be good. Is there a place for positive leadership in our world?

Yes … and no.

I had mixed feelings as I listened to Mr. Krieger. On one hand, I have had similar experiences, in which I, or people I know, have discovered something truly beautiful, impressive, or good, and when I tried to share it with others, it seemed to be rejected only because it was too positive, and therefore, by the definition of the skeptical mind, there must be something wrong with it. Like Mr. Krieger, when this happens to me, I worry about the people who express this skepticism and the culture they are perpetuating.

On the other hand, Mr. Mulally is one of the three CEOs from Detroit who seemed sufficiently out of touch during the financial crisis that he flew to Washington in a private jet during his first visit. Now, I do not think that flying on a private jet is an evil thing. There are times and place in which flying in a private jet may be an appropriate or good thing to do. But I do worry about Mr. Mullaly’s leadership in that moment, when the majority of American citizens (and perhaps even global citizens) were relatively united in their feelings about current events, while rich and sheltered participants like Mr. Mulally seemed to miss this almost entirely. How positive could his leadership really have been during this time?

The Romance of Leadership

When I think about Mr. Mulally as a CEO who seems to be doing a relatively good job with Ford, but who also seems to have some flaws, two different concepts come to mind for me. The first is a concept called the “romance of leadership.”

Scholars began to discuss the romance of leadership in the 1980s, and the idea was crystallized in the work of James Meindl, Sanford Ehrlich, and Janet Dukerich [1]. Simply put, they presented evidence that leadership has a “myth-like” quality to it. When performance is moderately good or moderately bad, we attribute that performance to obvious explanations: the state of the economy, more efficient operational procedures, an innovation, or investment. When performance is exceptionally good or exceptionally bad, though, it usually has multiple, complex causes that interact in ways that are hard for the human mind to see. As a result, we need a myth to explain it, and the handy myth that we have available is leadership: a romantic notion where an individual hero at the top of the organization saves the day (or disappoints us all).

Mulally fits this bill–at least to some extent. In the midst of a dramatic crisis that few people in our society truly understand, here is an auto company–a pillar of the U.S. economy for a century–that manages to come through without needing a government bailout, and is now posting positive performance again. Leadership is an easy explanation for this. And it is an explanation that ignores countless other factors in the global economy, in the industry, and within the organization itself.

So what is leadership for?

When the “romance of leadership” idea was introduced into the research on organizational behavior, many academic researchers loved it. It was a skeptical theory that de-mystified a concept that many thought was given too much reverence in our field. When I began working on my PhD in the 1990s, I quickly learned that leadership was a “passe” topic–not worth spending my time on.

There was a problem with this, though. While I do accept that leadership gets more credit than it deserves–both when things go well and when they go poorly–this does not mean that the concept should be thrown out entirely. If you want to know whether or not leadership makes a difference, all you have to do is ask any employee if their boss’ actions make a difference in their lives and in the way their unit of the organization is run. The answer is obvious, and we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The 2000s have seen a resurgence of leadership research. Some of it is regurgitating old ideas from ages past. But some of it is pushing the boundaries of what we know. One article that I appreciate from this new literature was written by Joel Podolny, Rakesh Khurana, and Marya Hill-Popper [2]. In this article, they argue that the purpose of leadership is to create meaning for others, and that leaders do this by acting in ways that display the leaders’ agency, rather than re-enacting taken-for-granted scripts that are accepted by others as appropriate. Agentic action causes others to have to make sense of what the leader is doing. If the others see positive meaning in the leader’s action, then they will subscribe to, or follow, the leader.

Positive Leadership

Just because people ascribe positive meaning to a leader’s actions does not mean that the leadership that is being exhibited is positive. It may, for example, have positive short-term implications for the followers, while also having negative long-term implications. Or it might be positive for one group of followers, while being negative for another group. It is because of this possibility for positive meaning to have negative implications that I thought about the second concept as I listened to Mr. Krieger talk about Mr. Mulally: Lift.

In our book, Lift: Becoming a Positive Force in Any Situation, we argue that a person has a positive influence (or in other words, exhibits positive leadership in a specific situation) when they rigorously answer four questions:

1. What result do I want to create?
2. What would my story be if I were living up to the values I expect of others?
3. How do others feel about this situation?
4. What are three to five strategies I could use to accomplish my purpose for this situation?

There are many reasons why we argue that answering these questions causes a person to exhibit positive leadership. For our purposes here, however, we will mention only one: when people answer these questions, they create and pursue a purpose that is broadly inclusive of different people’s needs and desires, and they are open to learning how to accomplish that purpose as they go along. In other words, when you experience lift, you learn and inspire others to learn more and more inclusive and more  and more positive meanings as you go along.

Alan Mulally and Lift

There is another concept from Lift that is helpful in understanding Alan Mulally. Lift is a state, not a trait. In other words, we do not assume that positive leaders exist. Rather, we assume that positive leadership exists. Sometimes, Alan Mulally exhibits positive leadership, which is what Mr. Krieger experienced. Sometimes he does not, which may be what happened when Mulally decided to fly his private jet to Washington D.C. Mr. Mulally may experience lift more often or more deeply than other leaders, which would lead people to ascribe to him the label of a positive leader. I do not know if this is true, but I am open to believing that.

I have found the idea that positive leadership is a state and not a trait to be a liberating idea. It means that we are all “works in progress.” I may not always be a positive influence. But I realize that this is an ideal I should always be striving for, but may not ever achieve. The positivity is as much in the striving as it is in the state. And we can, in any situation, be a positive influence. The opportunity is always there.

—————————————————–

References

[1] Meindl, J. R., Sanford, B. E., and Dukerich, J. M. (1985). The romance of leadership. Administrative Science Quarterly, 30(1):78-102.

[2] Podolny, J. M., Khurana, R., and Popper-Hill, Marya (2005). Revisiting the Meaning of Leadership. In B. M. Staw & R. M. Kramer (Eds.) Research in Organizational Behavior (vol. 26, pp. 1-36). Oxford: Elsevier.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 9:34 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.