Dear Fellows,
In view of the recent discussions of the scientist-practitioners gap, we think practitioners need to be alerted to important findings in research. Toward this purpose, we report on the necessity to supersede our traditional leadership education and training programs to make them compatible with our science and art. We concluded the following from our two-year review of 21st century developing and training leader-follower alliances by managers: (a) Necessary big 3 conditions has been identified which together mediate the relationship between prescribed leader beliefs and communications and later follower performance; (b) Current prescriptive protocols need to be changed to focus on establishing and maintaining the big 3 conditions, e.g., Transformational Leadership, Kouzes-Posner Leadership, Ohio State University Leadership; (c) Clients need to be made aware of the harm possible without this necessary mediator (George Graen & Julio Cañedo, 2017). In plain language, these research findings establish the fact that the above leadership programs prescribe only placebos. Specifically, the above theories prescribed behaviors for leaders were unrelated to follower performance unless the big 3 conditions were first established.
The big 3 mediating conditions should be no surprise to practitioners, because they have seen the unfortunate frustration of leaders when these necessary conditions are bypassed by picking the low hanging fruit of few high growth need strength followers who freely volunteer based on naive expectations of future career outcomes. The target beliefs of all followers about their leader necessary to instill the mediating conditions are the big three: followers must believe their leader is (1) competent, (2) trustworthy and (3) benevolent in working with them and that their leader believes the same about them. Once these beliefs are established the prescribed leader behavior becomes related to follower performance. A psychometrically sound measure of the state of the necessary conditions is available from the authors without charge. In addition, methods for HRM to meet these conditions are described in the leadership literature recommended by our two-year review.
In general, methods prescribed to meet these necessary conditions involve education to appreciate the larger context of leaders and followers in teams and coached practice to build confidence in the new protocols. Leadership education is a broad field of understanding the evolution, nature and future of the uniquely human process of co-creating the current state of the necessary conditions for a leader-follower alliance. With teams and networks of these alliances leaders may multiply follower collaborative performance and happiness far beyond that using only low hanging fruit. We feel it is a fulfilling growth experience to be a follower of a big 3 leader and it's too important to be left to amateurs. It's an exciting time to be in leadership education.
George Graen, UIUC
Julio Cañedo, University of Houston Downtown
Miriam Grace, The Boeing Company
Graen, George; Cañedo, Julio C. (2017). Charismatic and Innovative Team Leadership by and For Millennials In Oxford Bibliographies in Management. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.