Leadership coherence: An application of personality coherence theory to the study of leadership

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Abstract

The purpose of the current work was to extend recent developments in basic personality theory to the leadership domain. Accordingly, we introduce a new construct labeled leadership coherence, which refers to the notion that a leader’s behavior fluctuates in a consistent, reliable, and predictable idiographic manner across situations, thus capturing the purposeful and systematic variability in a leader’s behavior and decisions. Data were obtained from a diverse managerial sample (n = 109) employed in a variety of work settings. Stable and replicable intraindividual cross-situational profiles were found providing initial empirical support for the concept of leadership coherence. As the understanding of the ways in which leaders react and behave within and across situations is central to most leadership theories, examination of leadership behavior from an intraindividual cross-situational or coherence framework is a logical progression of leadership theory. This study provides the first step in this direction.

Introduction

Research aimed at understanding and predicting behavior has historically taken either a person- or situation-oriented approach; however, Lewin (1936) aptly captured the importance of both person and situation factors in the explanation of behavioral variability with:B=f(P,E)where B refers to the Behavior of interest, which is a function of both Person (P) and Environmental (E) characteristics. Lewin’s contributions were, and remain, highly influential because he explicitly stated the significance of the person, the situation, and the relative importance of each, which vary based on the circumstances of the other. Today, the person × situation interaction approach has emerged as one of the dominant approaches in the explanation of behavioral variability (e.g., Bandura, 1986, Pervin and John, 1999). Further, the person × situation interaction approach has been embraced by researchers and applied to many Industrial/Organizational Psychology (IO) and Organizational Behavior (OB) related constructs; two such exemplars are person-by-environment fit (see Cable and Judge, 1997, Kristof, 1996) and leadership contingency theories (see Fiedler, 1986, Hersey and Blanchard, 1988).

However, traditional models of person × situation interaction provide an incomplete picture of behavioral expression. As a result, researchers have extended person × situation interaction models into a repeated measures framework, which provides the opportunity to assess the temporal stability of person by situation interactions, where situations are often defined in psychological terms. The term coherence is used to describe behavior that “changes from situation to situation in a lawful, consistent, and idiographically predictable way” (Magnusson, 1976, p. 257). Thus, the coherence approach explores an individual’s behavioral tendencies or proclivities through stable and predictable patterns of variability across situations. Further, these resultant intraindividual cross-situational profiles explain both baseline levels of behavior (i.e., behavioral consistency) and patterns of variability (i.e., behavioral coherence), which result from the interaction between the individual and the situation (Mischel and Shoda, 1995, Shoda, 1990, Shoda et al., 1994). Therefore, intraindividual cross-situational profiles contain information about the unique ways in which the individual responds to their environment, and provides additional explanation in the search for understanding and predicting behavior.

Unlike recent person × situation interaction approaches within the social-personality literature (e.g., Caldwell et al., 2008, Cervone, 2005), the field of IO/OB has largely ignored coherence models. As displayed in Table 1, though there has been significant theoretical development within person-oriented approaches (where interindividual or nomothetic constructs are the primary determinants of leader behavior, e.g., transformational leadership theory), situation-oriented approaches (where contextual factors are the primary determinant of leader behavior, e.g., demands–constraints–choice theory), and traditional person × situation interaction approaches (where different leadership behaviors are necessary for different situations, e.g., least preferred co-worker) to leadership, a more theoretically rich behavioral coherence framework remains unexplored. The purpose of the present work is to expand the extant leadership literature through the application of coherence theory by offering a new construct termed leadership coherence, and providing an initial feasibility study to determine if this concept of leadership warrants further development. We suggest that leadership coherence provides logical progress towards a more comprehensive understanding of leader behavior and addresses a major gap in the literature.

In the following sections we provide an overview of coherence theory, followed by a study designed to test the initial feasibility of the leadership coherence concept.

Section snippets

Personality coherence and the present study

Coherence theory (e.g., Cervone and Shoda, 1999, Mischel and Shoda, 1995) advances traditional personality theory by describing an individual’s behavioral tendencies through stable cross-situational variability resulting from the interaction between the individual and psychologically similar situations or tasks. As a result, intraindividual cross-situational profiles contain information about the unique ways in which the individual responds to their environment, and therefore, provides

Participants

Participants were recruited through StudyResponse (see The StudyResponse Project, n.d., for details), an online service that connects researchers to individuals willing to complete research surveys, which is often used in organizational behavior research (e.g., Michel and Clark, 2009, Piccolo and Colquitt, 2006). Email invitations were sent to StudyResponse’s registered managerial occupational group, along with other randomly selected participants from occupational groups in which individuals

Results

Table 2 reports descriptive statistics and intercorrelations for study variables between subjects. As displayed, the active and passive measures of leadership assessed in each of the six situations possessed high internal consistency with coefficient alphas ranging from .90 to .98. However, given the nature of behavioral coherence, we now focus on within subject profile stability and aggregated or mean level profile stability estimates.

Discussion

The purpose of the current work was to apply the coherence conception of behavioral stability to the leadership domain by offering a new construct termed leadership coherence. Since the fundamental assumption of the coherence approach from both theoretical and measurement perspectives are profile stability, profile stability estimates were determined for a series of theoretically derived cross-situational profiles at the intraindividual level. General findings indicate that mean intraindividual

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