Measuring Leaders: The Presence of Good Behavior is Not the Absence of Bad
Every organization wants to identify and/or train great leaders. This is for good reason as one’s direct supervisor has the biggest impact on employee job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Lambert et al., 2012). However, the way in which we evaluate leaders is often flawed because it focuses only on the positive (Alvesson & Einola, 2019), attempting to identify good leaders by finding good behavior. However, this simple view of behavior does not reflect the complexity of human beings and ultimately misses out on some factors critical to identifying the leadership you want.
It’s pretty common to believe that we can categorize people into good and bad. The thought is that lots of good behavior means that a person is good and lots of bad behavior means that person is bad. The trouble with this view it assumes that good and bad behavior lies on opposite ends of a spectrum, that the absence of bad behavior means the presence of good behavior, and vice versa.
In reality, research shows that good and bad behavior operate independently of one another (Dalal, 2005). The absence of good behavior is not the presence of bad behavior, nor does the absence of bad indicate the presence of good. But how can neither exist? Well, the absence of good and bad behavior is essentially the absence of leadership actions, which, believe it or not, is a well-studied style of leadership called laissez-faire. Most important for your leadership evaluations, is the recognition that a person can be very high on both. The person who mentors young colleagues can also steal from the company.
Along with measuring a leader’s record of providing employees structure, resources, positive relationships, and success, ask employees to report the frequency of destructive behaviors such as volatile emotions, competence issues, poor communication, and micromanaging. Employees must be guaranteed anonymity to report these behaviors. Reported negative behaviors can often be handled through simple steps such as self-awareness and training. Only if the behaviors are not resolved should you then consider removing that leader from their position.
Sadly, the existence of effective leadership behaviors alongside toxic leader behaviors is evident in the countless CEOs famous known as much for their success as for their abuse (you know who they are). However, there are also countless successful and well-loved leaders whose employees rave about how good it is to work for them (and you should read those reviews). If you want a committed, hard-working, and happy team, you need to capture both the good and the bad, so that getting one doesn’t result in supporting the other.
Alvesson, M., & Einola, K. (2019). Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(4), 383–395.
Dalal, R. S. (2005). A meta-analysis of the relationship between organizational citizenship behavior and counterproductive work behavior. Journal of applied psychology, 90(6), 1241.
Lambert, L. S., Tepper, B. J., Carr, J. C., Holt, D. T., & Barelka, A. J. (2012). Forgotten but not gone: An examination of fit between leader consideration and initiating structure needed and received. Journal of Applied Psychology, 97(5), 913.
