Patterns of Leadership beahvior Related to Employee Grievances

PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY1998, 51

PATTERNS OF LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOR RELATED TOEMPLOYEE GRIEVANCES AND TURNOVER: SOMEPOST HOC REFLECTIONS

EDWIN A. FLEISHMANGeorge Mason University

The Most Frequently Cited Article of the 1960s

Patterns of Leadership Behavior Related to EmployeeGrievances and lUrnover

EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN AND EDWIN F HARRIS

This study investigates some relationships between the leader behaviorof industrial supervisors and the behavior of their group members. Itrepresents an extension of earlier studies carried out at the Interna-tional Harvester Company, while the authors were with the Ohio StateUniversity Leadership Studies.

It is hard to believe that 36 years have passed since the original pub-lication of our article "Patterns of Leadership Behavior Related to Em-ployee Grievances and Turnover." I still get requests for reprints (yes, Istill have some) or for permission from authors to reproduce the originalfigures in their textbooks. That it was the most cited article published inPersonnel Psychology in the 1960s was a surprise to us. Of course, muchhas happened in the field of leadership research since publication of thisarticle in 1962. Yet, it is somehow comforting to know that some con-structs and findings are still useful and that the work of colleagues hasbeen influenced by them.

I appreciate the invitation by the editor of this journal to discuss whatled us to the publication of this article and to reflect on what followed.First, I would like to provide some of the research that led to this partic-ular study. Some of this may add some historical documentation aboutsome of the "earlier days" of the field of leadership research. Next, Iwill summarize what I see as the major findings and implications. It isinteresting to me that some of the results I found most interesting are notnecessarily those that are quoted in the literature. Finally, I will providea brief epilogue on the status of this work in relation to the current statusof this field.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be addressed to Edwin A. Fleishman,11304 Spur Wheel Lane, Potomac, MD 20854.

COPYRIGHT © 1998 PERSONNEL PSYCHOLOGY, INC.

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Historical Context

I was a research assistant at the Ohio State University LeadershipStudies working with Carroll Shartle, Ralph Stogdill, and John Hemphill,who were among the major figures in this program. I was subsequentlyawarded the first International Harvester Company Fellowship to pur-sue my interests in leadership research, using their truck manufacturingcompany as the organizational base.

This project, which subsequently became known as the "Interna-tional Harvester Study," had three primary phases. The first phase in-volved development of the instruments to measure leader behavior andattitudes in industry and resulted in the confirmation and definition ofthe constructs "consideration" and "initiating structure." This develop-ment included the item analysis and factor analysis work that producedthe Supervisory Behavior Description (SBD) and Leadership OpinionQuestionnaire (LOQ), described in several early articles (e.g., Fleish-man, 1953b, 1953c, 1957).

Earlier, I had been influenced by the studies of Lewin, Lippitt, andWhite (1939), who introduced the concept of "social climate" into theirstudies of leadership of boys in recreational groups. I hypothesized thatthis concept could be examined in relation to leadership in complexorganizations. Today, the study of culture and climate in organizationsis a thriving research area (e.g., Schein, 1992; Schneider, 1990). TheInternational Harvester Studies may have been the first to examine thepotency of this construct, at least in some primitive form, as a moderatorof leader behavior and the results of leadership training in organizations.

The second phase of the original Harvester research utilized mea-sures of leader Consideration and Structure to evaluate changes in fore-man leadership attitudes and behavior resulting fi-om a centralized man-agement training program for company supervisors. The amount ofchange was evaluated at three different times—once while the foremenwere still in the training setting, again after they had returned from train-ing to the plant environment (evaluated at three intervals up to 3 years),and still later after a "refi-esher" training course. The results showedthat immediately after training, while in the training situation, there wasa distinct increase in Consideration and an unexpected decrease in Struc-ture attitudes. Another finding, hardly ever cited, is that leadership at-titudes among the trainees became more dissimilar rather than moresimilar, despite the fact that all foremen had received the same training.

This finding alone should have alerted us to the complexity of train-ing effects, which depended at least in part on what the supervisorbrought to training in terms of his predispositions and experiences. Whenthe supervisor's behavior and attitudes were evaluated back in the plant.

EDWIN A. FLEISHMAN 827

the effects of the training largely disappeared over time. This pointedto the main finding, which was the overriding importance of the inter-action of the training effects with certain aspects of the social setting inwhich the foremen had to operate in the plant. Most critical was the"leadership climate" supplied by the leadership behavior and attitudesof the foreman's own boss in the plant. This was found to be more re-lated to the foreman's own Consideration and Structure behavior thanwas the fact that he had or had not received the leadership training.The results of this work were first published in this journal (Fleishman,1953a), although there was an earlier, more detailed, Ohio State leader-ship project report (Fleishman, 1951).

Subsequent to this work, Edwin F. Harris received the second In-ternational Harvester Fellowship at Ohio State and carried out a thirdmajor phase which could be termed the "criterion phase." In this phase,the relationships between Consideration and Structure and different in-dices of foremen proficiency were examined. In my view, these con-tributions to the area of criterion development and leadership have notreceived the attention they deserved. This work was an early demonstra-tion of the need for a multidimensional view of work group performanceand leader effectiveness. Also demonstrated was the effort required to"decontaminate" criterion measures and to identify the sources of crite-rion contamination in order to purify them for use in subsequent validitystudies. This phase demonstrated the fruitfulness of such a multidimen-sional approach in providing a better understanding of the phenomenaof leadership in terms of its influence on a variefy of individual, group,and organizational indices of performance.

An important finding was that production supervisors rated high in"proficiency" by plant management turned out to have leadership pat-terns high in Structure and low in Consideration. (This relationshipwas accentuated in departments scoring high on a third variable, "per-ceived pressure of deadlines"). On the other hand, this same patternof high Structure and low Consideration was found to be related tohigh labor turnover, union grievances, worker absences and accidents,and low worker satisfaction. There was some indication that these re-lationships differed in "nonproduction" department. Another seldomquoted finding was that foremen with low Consideration and low Struc-ture were more often bypassed by subordinates in the informal organi-zational structure. In any case, it was evident that "what is an effectivesupervisor" was a complex question, depending on the proficiency cri-terion emphasized, management values, type of work, and other situa-tional variables. The most comprehensive treatment of the three phaseInternational Harvester Study was published in our book "Leadershipand Supervision in Industry" (Fleishman, Harris, & Burtt, 1955).


This gives me an opportunity to call attention to another seldom citedstudy that followed my original leadership training evaluation work. Thiswas the study that showed the importance of evaluating the effects ofleadership at the individual as well as the group level. I have indicatedthat exposure to leadership training did not make participants more likeone another on either Consideration or Structure. In our follow-upstudy (Harris & Fleishman, 1955) correlations were determined betweenscores obtained before and after leadership training courses for fore-men, compared with test-retest correlations for control groups receivingno training over the same time intervals. A major finding was the stabil-ity of leadership patterns (for both Consideration and Structure) acrosstime, for control groups that did not have intervening training. How-ever, there was a significant shrinkage in the correlations when therewas intervening training. These findings were replicated in a study ofthe effects of "refresher training" on the stabilify of leadership attitudesand behavior across time. Again it was shown that a comparison of meandifferences between control and trained group could be misleading. Thefinding of insignificant mean differences due to training did not tell thewhole story; again there was significant shrinkage in pre-post trainingcorrelations, relative to the test-retest correlations for a control group.This meant that the training affected different managers differently, onboth Consideration and Structure. It appeared that the effects of thetraining depended on factors within the individual (e.g., personality) andin his situation (e.g., climate in the plant).

The 1962 Study

In the years following the publication of the Harvester studies, Iturned to some broader interests in performance measurement (e.g.,Fleishman, 1972,1982; Fleishman & Quaintance, 1984) and Ed Harriseventually began his long career in Executive Development at ChryslerMotors. The LOQ and SBD were published, used widely, and are stillavailable (Fleishman, 1960, 1989a, 1989b). As these measures of Con-sideration and Structure continued to be used in a variety of settings byme and by others, a number of questions came to mind. First, what is theform of the relationship between leader behavior and indices of groupbehavior? Is it linear or curvilinear? As far as we knew, no one had re-ally examined this question. Rephrased, this question asks if there arecritical levels of Consideration and/or Structure beyond which it does ordoes not make a difference in work group behavior? Is an "average"amount of Structure better than a great deal or no Structure at all? Ina similar manner, is there an optimum level of Consideration above orbelow which worker grievances and/or turnover rise sharply?


A second set of questions concerned the possible interaction effectsof different combinations of Consideration and Structure. In our stud-ies, and others after the Harvester Studies, significant correlations havebeen found between each of these patterns and such indices as ratedproficiency, grievances, turnover, departmental reputation, subordinatesatisfactions, and so forth (for reviews see Bass, 1990; Fleishman, 1973b,1989a, 1989b). These studies present some evidence that scoring low onboth dimensions is not desirable. They also indicate that some balanceof Consideration and Structure may be optimal for satisfying both pro-ficiency and morale criteria. We feit that a more intensive examinationof possible optimum combinations of Consideration and Structure wasneeded and that some post-hoc analyses of our data from the Harvesterproject would provide some insights into these questions.

Space allotted here does not allow comments on all our results.The original article provides the data and graphic representations. Tosummarize briefly, work group grievance rates as well as work groupturnover rates were found to be quite reliable over the 11-month period.The findings of stable work group grievance and turnover rates over timewere important results. Next, the study indicated that there were severalsignificant relationships between the leader behavior of foremen and thelabor grievances and employee turnover in their work groups. In gen-eral, low Consideration and high Structure were accompanied by highgrievances and turnover in the work groups. However, there appearedto be certain critical levels beyond which increased Consideration or de-creased Structure had no effect on grievance or turnover rates. Sim-ilarly, grievances and turnover were shown to increase most markedlyat the extreme ehds of the Consideration (low end) and Structure (highend) scales. However, the relationships were clearly curvilinear, not lin-ear, and hyperbolic, not parabolic.

The critical points at which increased Structure and decreased Con-sideration begin to relate to group behavior were not the same for griev-ances and turnover. Increases in turnover did not occur until lower onthe Consideration scale and higher on the Structure scale, as comparedwith increases in grievances. For example, if Consideration is steadilyreduced, higher grievances appear before increased turnover occurs. Itappears that there may be different "threshold levels" of Considerationand Structure related to effects on grievances and turnover.

Other principal findings concerned the interaction effects found be-tween different combinations of Consideration and Structure. Taken incombination. Consideration was shown to be the dominant factor. Forexample, both grievances and turnover were highest in groups havinglow Consideration foremen, regardless of the degree of Structuring be-havior shown by these same foremen. Grievances and turnover were


lowest for groups with foremen showing medium to high Considerationtogether with low Structure. However, one of the most important resultswas the finding that high Consideration foremen could increase Struc-ture with very little increase in grievances and no increase in turnover intheir work groups, regardless of the amount of Structuring engaged in.In other words, higher Consideration moderated the negative effects ofStructure.

Thus, with regard to grievances and turnover, leader behavior char-acterized by low Consideration is more critical than behavior character-ized by high Structure. Apparently, supervisors can compensate for highStructure by increased consideration, but low Consideration supervisorscannot compensate by decreasing their Structuring behavior.

Our interpretation was that workers under foremen who establisha climate of mutual trust, rapport, and tolerance for two-way commu-nication with their work groups are more likely to accept higher levelsof Structure. This might be because they perceive this Structure dif-ferently from employees in "low Consideration" climates. Thus, under"low Consideration" climates, high Structure (e.g., instruction) is seenas threatening and restrictive, but under "high Consideration" climatesthis same Structure is seen as supportive and helpful. A related interpre-tation is that foremen who establish such an atmosphere can more easilysolve the problems resulting from high Structure. Thus, grievances maybe solved at this level before they get into the official records. Similarly,turnover may reflect escape from a problem situation which cannot beresolved in the absence of mutual trust and two-way communication. Insupport of this interpretation, I had other evidence that leaders high inConsideration are also better at predicting subordinates' responses toproblems (Fleishman & Salter, 1963).

The nonlinear relations between leader behavior and the criteria ofeffectiveness provided a number of implications for leadership research.For one thing, they pointed up the need for a more careful examinationof the form of such relationships before computing correlation coeffi-cients. At least some obtained correlations with leadership variablesmay be underestimates because of linearity assumptions. In a similarfashion, negative or contradictory results may be "explained" by the factthat (a) inappropriate coefficients were used or (b) these studies weredealing with only the flat portions of these curves. If, for example, all theforemen in our study had scored over 76 on Consideration and under 36on Structure, we would have concluded that there was no relation be-tween these leadership patterns and grievances and turnover. Perhaps,in comparing one study with another, we need to specify the range ofleader behavior involved in each study.


Epilogue

In this brief review, I have tried to place our 1962 article in the con-text of the research that preceded this study. I have also tried to highlightsome neglected aspects of our findings, some research questions raised,and I have made some effort to show what has and has not been followedup. I will conclude with a few additional reflections.

There have been at least some partial replications of our results withrespect to these interactions of Consideration and Structure (e.g.. Cum-mins, 1971; Matsui, Osawa, & Terai, 1975; Skinner, 1969). However, itis difficult to find other work stimulated by our findings of curvilinearifyin leadership-workgroup performance relationships. The importance oforganizational climate was certainly foreshadowed by this series of stud-ies. The criterion phase underscored our earlier results on leadershipclimate as critical to the leadership behavior and attitudes of first linemanagement and to the effects of leadership training. These findingsrequired further exploration and explanation. In the last phase we sawthat upper management actually rated as more proficient those foremenwho were high in Structure and low in Consideration. This, they did,in the face of objective data that this was detrimental in terms of otherlong-term criteria of work group performance such as grievances andturnover. We also discovered the importance of an important modera-tor variable, "pressure for production," in producing this effect.

Although the leadership training produced changes in attitudes andbehavior in the short run, it became clear why these effects did not lastvery long in the plant environment. These results did influence corpo-rate management to shift the emphasis in training to higher levels ofplant management. Such matters are, of course, taken for granted inmuch of today's organizational development milieu. Perhaps the Inter-national Harvester studies made an early contribution to those develop-ments.

One reason the 1962 article is so frequently cited may be due, at leastin part, to the comprehensive definitions of Consideration and Structureprovided there. These constructs have been remarkably robust, perhapsdue to their parsimony and heuristic value. The availabilify of quantita-tive measures of them allows for the possibilities of comparative studies,as well as studies like our 1962 research, which allow statements aboutthreshold values and the form of the relationship between leadershippatterns and criteria of performance. Of course, many other leader di-mensions have since been identified (for a review see Fleishman, Mum-ford, Zaccaro, Levin, Korokin, & Hein, 1991). However, after all theconceptualizations, factor analyses, and theorizing are done, some form


of Consideration and Structure generally emerge among the overarch-ing constructs or as a significant part of the mix. I am grateful to havebeen associated with colleagues John Hemphill, Ralph Stogdill, and B.J. Winer as part of the original team which first identified them.

Since the days of these early studies, developments in the area ofleadership training have been diverse and extensive. However, to thisday, our earlier evaluations have been cited as one of the few attemptsto do a controlled leadership training evaluation. The difficulties of do-ing this have been daunting, but the need for such evaluations is still aresponsibility of our discipline (Goldstein, 1993). The disappointmentsof so many leadership training fads and programs provide ample testi-mony for this need.

Since these ealier studies, our conceptions of leadership and our re-search interests have broadened and encompassed so much more. Inthose "early days" the focus was more on the interpersonal influenceaspects of leadership. The program I described led me to view lead-ership as a process of interpersonal influence aimed at "optimizing" acomplex set of possibly contradictory individual, group, and organiza-tional goals (Fleishman, 1973). For a number of years, my colleaguesand I, as well as many others, continued to relate Consideration andStructure to different criteria of individual, group, and organizationalperformance in a wide variety of contexts (for reviews see Fleishman,1973a, 1973b, 1989a, 1989b). Later I updated my views on the status ofsome of this work (Fleishman, 1998). However, with the stimulation andcollaboration of colleagues at George Mason University, my interestshave shifted to the identification of cognitive skills related to leadershipat higher levels of management (e.g., Fleishman et al., 1991; Fleishman,Zaccaro, & Mumford, 1991; Mumford, Zaccaro, Harding, Fleishman,& Reiter-Palmon, 1993) including the management and leadership ofcreative work teams (Fleishman and Friedman, 1990; Friedman, Fleish-man, & Fletcher, 1992). I have been encouraged that we have beenable to identift such skills and to develop computer-interactive measuresthat predict leadership performance involving such activities as problemidentification, planning, solution evaluation, and social problem solv-ing (Marshall-Meis, Fleishman, Martin, Zaccaro, Baughman, & McGee,1998).

With regard to the 1962 study, I still recall the elation of discoveringthat our hypotheses about curvilinear relations and interactions amongleadership dimensions were confirmed by our additional analyses. I haveexperienced a number of such moments during my research career. Iam very pleased that this earlier work has been recognized as a usefulcontribution in the still fascinating field of leadership research.


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Patterns of Leadership beahvior Related to Employee Grievances

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