Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. [John Welch, American businessman, former head of General Electric]
Vision is the key to understanding leadership, and real leaders have never lost the childlike ability to dream dreams… Vision is the blazing campfire around which people with gather. It provides light, energy, warmth and unity. [Bill Newman, Australian broadcaster]
The very essence of leadership is that you have to have a vision. It’s got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. [Theodore Hesburgh, former President of the University of Notre Dame].
The above quotations are representative of a large number that are routinely abstracted from a galaxy of books on leadership and management in order to provide would-be leaders with personal motivation, business wisdom, and professional guidance. Indeed, if you enter the words ‘leadership’ and ‘vision’ into a web-based search engine, you will find hundreds of references to these quotations and to others like them. The sentiment that these all convey is that leaders have to do ‘the vision thing’ and that, if they do, followers will be drawn to them, like moths to a flame, and willingly do their bidding. Also implicit in such quotations is the notion that a sense of vision will serve to exalt the leader in the eyes of followers and imbue him or her with mystic appeal in the form of charisma. According to this view, the visionary leader is an enigmatic talisman, an organizational Pied Piper who takes followers to places that they are unable or unwilling to go on their own.
In practice, though, things are not that simple. For just as vision is the stuff of leadership, so too it is the stuff of manic tirade, of schizophrenic hallucination, of grandiose delusion. In his text on the leadership secrets of Hitler and Churchill, the Cambridge historian Andrew Roberts makes this point by quoting the American journalist Heywood Broun:
Just as every conviction begins as a whim, so does every emancipator serve his apprenticeship as a crank. A fanatic is a great leader who is just entering a room.
The fact is, though, that some would-be emancipators never cast off their status as cranks and some potentially great leaders are never seen as more than fanatics. For this reason, on its own, possession of a vision has been found to have almost no power to predict whether or not someone will be a successful leader. This point is made compellingly by David Nadler and Michael Tushman (1990) on the basis of an extensive review of research that involved tracking leaders’ performance over time. At the end of this they conclude starkly “unfortunately, in real time it is unclear who will be known as visionaries and who will be known as failures" (p.80).
For this reason, the question of how it is that a leader’s vision can be translated into the efforts of followers emerges as a master problem in the leadership literature. Indeed, as Roberts observes, “this question lies at the heart of history and civilization" (2003, p.xix). At a practical level too, the implications of being able to answer this question satisfactorily are enormous, as it speaks to a range of behaviors upon which collective success depends. For example, the success of leadership vision is integral to processes of collective engagement, active citizenship, and social change. It has the capacity to unite people, to give them a sense of shared purpose and to make the impossible possible. Consequently, while it is wrong to think that a sense of vision makes someone a charismatic leader, it is also wrong to think that charismatic leadership — and, more importantly, the progress with which this is associated — can be achieved without it.
So how is it that the plans and schemes of an individual (or select individuals) become the wishes and actions of a multitude? What is it that allows words and ideas to be translated into material reality? And why are followers sometimes prepared to ‘go the extra mile’ to ensure that the goals identified by a leader are achieved?
As well as challenging received answers to these questions, our forthcoming book, The New Psychology of Leadership(Haslam, Reicher & Platow, 2007; see also Reicher, Haslam & Hopkins, 2005; Reicher, Haslam & Platow, 2007), focuses on four factors. As John Turner and others have previously argued, these center around the argument that effective leadership is agroup process that involves creating, co-ordinating and embedding a sense of social identity that is shared between leaders and followers (e.g., Turner, 1991; Turner & Haslam, 2001; see also Haslam & Platow, 2001). In short, successful leadership involves creating a sense of ‘us’, and then translating this into practices that advance the interests and outcomes of the group as a whole.
1. Leaders need to be ‘one of us’
A key plank in our argument is that leaders’ capacity to display leadership will depend upon their ability to embody those norms and values that the group they lead shares in any given context. Leaders need to tap into ‘who we are’ and to project this to both internal and external audiences. To be effective they can’t stand out on a limb, apart from the group, but need to be seen as central to what the group is about and what its members stand for. Evidence consistent with this claim emerged from the BBC Prison study (Reicher & Haslam, 2006; see also Haslam & Reicher, 2007; Reicher, Haslam & Hopkins, 2005) where individual leaders could only convince followers to take up their cause as democrats or authoritarians once the views they espoused had come to be seen as representative of followers as a whole — either through their own actions or through changes in broader group dynamics that made democratic or authoritarian strategies seem attractive and appropriate.
One fairly straightforward implication of this claim is that if group activities and interaction serve to emphasize what makes leaders different from other ingroup members in a way that undermines the collective meaning of the group, then their leadership may be undermined and rendered less effective. Groups have little need for maverick leaders who are intent on ‘doing their own thing’ with no heed to the concerns of the team as a whole. This is not to say that leaders cannot be creative or different, only that their creativity and difference from others must be seen to promote rather than to compromise the interests and identity of the group.
We have found support for this idea in studies where leadership selection processes suggest either that leaders are similar to other group members or that they are fundamentally different (Haslam et al. , 1998; Platow et al. , 2006). In the latter case, followers prove much more reluctant to support the leader or engage in group activities, and group performance as a whole is found to suffer. Along related lines, work by Julie Duck and Kelly Fielding (2003) at the University of Queensland has shown that group members show high levels of identification with their group when their leader is representative of that group — whatever course of action the leader chooses to pursue. However, if the leader is representative of another group then group members’ identification — and their willingness to do the leader’s bidding — is much lower, especially if that leader displays favoritism towards members of that other group.
2. Leaders need to be seen to be ‘in the same boat’ as followers
Following on from the previous point, one of the important conclusions that emerges from empirical research is that leadership appears to be enhanced to the extent that followers perceive that they and their leaders are ‘in the same boat’. This means, for example, that if leaders receive rewards (financial or otherwise) that are perceived to unfairly differentiate them from their followers then this will tend to undermine group (and leadership) effectiveness.
This point is clearly relevant to debates that are regularly conducted in newspapers when details of the remuneration packages awarded to company chief executives are released. Does the fact that these executives routinely receive pay rises that far outstrip those of their employees have any impact on those employees’ motivation and performance? Yes it does. As the influential management theorist Peter Drucker has observed “Very high salaries at the top disrupt the team. They make even high-ranking people in the company see their own top management as adversaries rather than as colleagues ... and that quenches any willingness to say "we" (1986, p.14).
This point is confirmed in some of our empirical studies which show that an increase in the disparity between leaders’ remuneration and that of followers does nothing to enhance leaders’ motivation but has a demotivating impact on followers (Haslam & Platow, 2001a). It also fits with previous work by Edwin Hollander (e.g., 1995) who notes that, at a national level, the gap between executives’ salaries and those of average workers tends to be negatively correlated with overall company performance. Thus he notes that in countries where there tends to be a smaller disparity between executives and workers’ salaries, the overall productivity (and satisfaction) of the workforce tends to be higher.
3. Leaders need to stand for ‘us’ rather than ‘them’
The previous point suggests that differences between leaders and followers can be problematic if they violate the sense of shared social identity that locks group members into any collective enterprise. In this way, followers’ support is conditional upon their appreciation of a leader’s qualities within a particular social context. This means that the attributes that ‘count’ as good and worthy in a leader are partly determined by the leader’s capacity to define the ingroup clearly and positively in the specific situation that the group confronts. What leaders stand for and the properties they evince thus need to contribute to a context-sensitive definition of the ingroup that allows ‘us’ to be construed as different from, and better than, ‘them’ — whoever they might be. So, for example, we have found that while people may generally be disposed to favor leaders who are intelligent, if an organization is entering into competition with a group that prides itself on its intelligence, then the leader of that organization has to be careful to differentiate the organization’s intelligence, and his or her own, from that of the outgroup (Turner & Haslam, 2001).
Evidence of these dynamics at work is also revealed during the various rounds of the US presidential election. During the Primaries, when members of the same party are competing with each other to exemplify what it means to be a member of that party, they need to espouse different views than they do during the General Election when they need to exemplify what it means to be a ‘good American’ more generally. Indeed, one explanation for Hillary Clinton’s unexpectedly poor performance in the 2008 Iowa primary (where she came third to Barack Obama and John Edwards), is that she and her advisors had their sights set on the general election and were making statements with this context in mind — a factor which tended to undermine her credentials as a ‘good Democrat’. More generally too, the fact that incumbent Presidents do not have to make the case for their leadership credentials in these two very different contexts is one reason why they are at an advantage when running for a second term.
4. Leaders need to ‘do it for us’
The above analysis gives some insight into the way in which structural features (e.g., selection processes, salary schemes, the nature of competitors) can impact upon a leader’s effectiveness. It is obviously true, however, that leadership is contingent upon what a leader actually does. In this regard, a major implication of our analysis is that leaders’ capacity to marshal support for their plans will be enhanced to the extent that they are able to advance the collective interests and aspirations of the group they lead. Moreover, because much of the demand for leadership emerges in competitive contexts it also follows that this will often involve promotion of the ingroup at the expense of an outgroup.
Again, though, the key to leadership lies not in getting followers to say that they agree with a vision, but in enticing them to do the work that helps make that vision a reality. Many a leader’s grand designs have been left in tatters because the support that they initially elicited was never translated into anything concrete. Followers’ words of support are cheap; what counts is their sweat and toil (and sometimes their blood and tears). Accordingly, these are more dearly sought, and less easily bought.
A critical question, therefore, is under what conditions will a leader’s vision and behavior be translated into emotional, intellectual and material commitment from followers? Under what circumstances are followers willing to exert effort in order to ensure that a leader’s aspirations are realized? Evidence from a range of studies we have conducted shows that it is only when a leader has a history of standing up for the group and its members that the group in turn is prepared to stand up for them and do the worknecessary for their vision to be realized.
For example, Haslam and Platow (2001b) found that students only generated arguments and ideas that backed up a leader’s plans for improving their campus, if that leader had a record of making decisions that supported positions that were normative for the group (e.g., opposing government cuts). This is one reason why party followers scrutinize Senate voting records so closely when deciding who to back (and work for) through the Presidential nomination process. By the same token, candidates routinely point to their rivals’ voting records in order to strategically undermine their support base.
This same point also emerges from the carefully observed ethnographic field studies of Clifford Stott and John Drury (2000). These examine the evolution of riots during public events (e.g., protest rallies, soccer tournaments) and show that individuals who seek to engage in conflict with police only assume a position of leadership (whereby they are able to influence others to participate in violent acts) once relations between police and those they are policing (e.g., protestors, football fans) have become antagonistic and violence is seen to define an appropriate response to the intergroup situation at hand. Critically too, at apractical level, it is the leader’s possession of particular skills that the group needs in these contexts (e.g., to resist, to fight) that make others turn to them. However, in the absence of such dynamics, those who promote violence are typically dismissed as dangerous thugs and rarely gain influence. Moreover, it is worth noting that sensitivity to such dynamics on the part of police in Europe has played a major role in reducing the incidence of major disturbances at public events in recent years. Indeed, this line of research gives powerful testimony to the practical advantages of a theory that accounts for the ongoing interplay between leadership and group dynamics (see Stott et al., 2007).
Conclusion: Social identity creates effective vision and charisma
As a great many other researchers have noted, notions of vision and charisma are central to leadership. It is a simple truth that leaders will have a greater capacity to influence followers if they articulate a clear vision and are charismatic. Critically, though, we argue that these aspects of leadership are not ‘givens’ that successful leaders bring with them to the leadership situation and then unload on followers who can do little other than lap them up adoringly.
Instead, a major point that emerges from our work is that the vision and charisma of leaders and the emergence of their leadership is bound up with the group context which gives these things meaning. The argument is not simply that the suitability of particular individuals for offices of leadership changes as a function of their circumstances (as contingency theories propose). Rather it is that leaders and followers are transformed and energized as partners in an emerging identity-based relationship. For this reason, we suggest that models of leadership and charisma which are founded solely upon an appreciation of the psychology of individuals in their individuality — as most are — are necessarily limited.
As an illustration of these points, it is instructive to conclude by reflecting on the work of the eminent theologian Philip Esler pertaining to the question of Paul’s leadership of the Romans. Paul, it will be recalled, was the Pharisee who took an active part in the persecution of Christians but then had a vision that led him to convert to Christianity and enjoin multitudes of others to do likewise through the power and clarity of his teaching. This was a radical, dangerous course (putting it mildly) but, of course, it came to exert a massive impact on world history that has affected all our lives. As a result, Paul was canonized and is now celebrated (at least by Christians) as a charismatic leader par excellence.
So how did he do it? Based on an exhaustive analysis of relevant texts, Esler’s definitive answer is that Paul “turned himself and [his would-be followers] into an ‘us’ in relation to their identity as Christ-followers, thus gaining their commitment to a sense of self from which they would derive meaning, purpose and value" (p.223)
In short, then, the secret of Paul’s success was that he understood that in order to propel his mission forward he needed to build with his followers a sense of shared social identity. Without this, his charisma would have gone unrecognized and his vision would have been just another dream. Without this, the road to Damascus would have been just another road.
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