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WHARTON LEADERSHIP
DIGEST
January, 2007,
Volume 11, Number
4
CONTENTS
Finding Your Moral Compass: Reflections from General
Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Research
Review: Does Leadership Behavior in Teams Matter?
The 11th Annual Wharton
Leadership Conference,
Philadelphia,
June 7, 2007
This
one-day intensive conference is devoted to exchanging
ideas about how managers and organizations can best
build their present and future leadership. Presenters
draw upon their own organization’s experience to find,
identify, recruit, prepare, and train their talent for
positions of responsibility. Where are the best sources
of talent? What are the best development experiences
for building leadership capacities? When is the time to
invest in leadership development? Who has the best
programs for fostering leadership – and what are the
secrets of their success? The presenters bring not only
the developmental methods of their enterprise but also
their own personal developmental experiences into active
dialogue with conference participants.
FINDING YOUR MORAL COMPASS: Reflections from General
Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
 Serving as
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since his
appointment in September, 2005, General Peter Pace is
currently the highest ranking member of the Armed Forces
and the principle military advisor to the president and
secretary of defense. Gen. Pace, who graduated from the
United States Naval Academy and earned an MBA at George
Washington University, began his military career by
serving as a platoon leader in Vietnam. Since then, he
has held command positions at nearly every level of the
service.
As he has in
past years, Pace spoke on November 28, 2006, to two
sections of Professor Michael Useem’s “Managing People
at Work,” a course required of all first-year Wharton
MBA students. What follows is an edited version of
Pace’s opening remarks to both classes.
GENERAL PETER
PACE: My first piece of advice is to ask yourself two
questions: Who are you today, and who do you want to be
at the end of your career? I’m not talking about being
the head of a corporation. I’m talking about your moral
compass – what you will and will not allow yourself to
do.
When I first
started out, I thought I knew exactly what I would let
myself do. But the test came for me in combat. I learned
quickly that the emotions of the battlefield make you
think about doing things you would never consider doing
in a quiet moment. The same thing happens, I believe,
in the corporate world. It certainly happens in
Washington, D.C.
When you’re
walking into a room full of very important people,
whether it be in government or in business, you need to
know what you will allow yourself to do and not do. If
you’re sitting there, as a person with kids, a mortgage,
responsibilities, and the company you’re working for
starts talking about doing something you think isn’t
right, or your boss asks you to do something you don’t
think is right, what will you do?
You don’t get
the opportunity to think when those challenges to your
moral integrity arise. You’ve got to have an anchor
already out there. Sitting in these classrooms, getting
this great education, is the perfect time to think about
who you are and what you’ll allow yourself to do.
Because you will be challenged at times when you least
expect it and are least prepared to deal with it. If you
don’t have a moral foundation, then the winds assaulting
your integrity can blow you off course.
My guess is you
all are going to be enormously successful; you are going
work in businesses that earn huge amounts of money. I
cannot think of an environment where your integrity and
moral compass would be tried more often.
In combat, I
learned to appreciate the courage of individuals who
took personal risk. Since that time, I have also learned
to appreciate individuals who have the courage of their
convictions in group settings. In combat, if you make a
mistake, you might die. In business, if you are sitting
with your bosses and you put your opinion on the table,
you don’t get to die; you have to live with what they
think of you.
I am often
involved in senior meetings in which the conversation
among many powerful people is going in a certain
direction. I have enormous respect for someone who has
the temerity to say, “I see it differently.” How you
stand up for your ideas depends on your own comfort
level. But if you are known as a person who
unemotionally states your facts, who tells the truth as
you know it, you will always be welcome at meetings, and
your counsel and advice will always be sought. You will
not always be right, you will not always carry the day,
but you will always be respected as someone who will
speak your mind as honestly and truthfully as possible.
Just this past
Sunday I went to a meeting, and I knew in advance what
the topic was going to be. Before I went, I took a piece
of paper and wrote down: these are the things I want to
have happen as a result of this meeting; these are the
things I do not want to have happen; these are the
things I am going to say; these are the things I am not
going to let myself say yes to. I took a quiet moment to
just sit down and think it through.
When I went to
the meeting, I got across every point I wanted to in the
two-hour meeting, not in the order I had them, but just
as they fit into the conversation. As others came up
with ideas that were on my no-thank-you list, I was
prepared to say why I didn’t want to do those things.
That does not mean everybody in the room was happy to
hear the no-thank-you parts of my message. But I walked
out of that room saying to myself, “I am walking out of
here as the guy I wanted to be when I walked in.”
That opportunity
happens to me every day as I work in government. It will
happen to you more often as you become more senior, but
it will certainly happen.
General Pace: "I have enormous
respect for someone who has the temerity to say,
'I see it differently.'" (Photo by Tommy
Leonardi)
My second piece
of advice concerns integrity. You are coming into this
game with your name and your integrity. Nobody’s going
to change your name, and nobody can take your integrity
away from you. Only you can give it away.
All of you in
this room are going to be enormously successful. You did
not just fall off of the turnip truck and find yourself
sitting here. You’ve worked hard and earned the
opportunity to come to this room. I can think of nothing
sadder than the idea of you at age 50 or 60, at the end
of a successful career, looking in the mirror and not
liking the person you see there because you know you got
where you are by selling pieces of your soul. A lot of
people allow themselves to fall into that position, and
the results are very sad.
Would you allow
yourself or your company to receive predated stock
options? That’s just one small example of the kind of
decisions that may seem minor at the time but that
challenge the core of your own integrity and the
integrity of the group with which you work.
If you can walk
into every meeting knowing who you want to be when you
walk out, you will walk out being that person. If you
know fundamentally the extent of your personal
integrity, then when the opportunity comes for you to do
something that isn’t quite right, you’ll at least have
something to hold on to.
My third and
last piece of advice is, take care of your people. You
may have one person working for you; you may have a
hundred; you may have a thousand. In whatever way is
comfortable for you, let the people who look to you for
leadership know you care about them. You can do that by
just walking around and talking to them. When they need
something, try to help them. It doesn’t have to be
work-related, as long as people know you care about
them. Being a human being to them will make a lot of
difference.
Looking back on
my own career, it’s evident to me that because people I
worked with believed I cared about them as individuals,
they took things I did imperfectly and cleaned them up
and got them going in the right direction. If you don’t
like your boss, and he or she does something stupid, you
would just as soon watch them fall. If you like them,
you don’t want them to fall. If you believe they care
about you and where you’re going, you want them to be
successful so you can all be successful.
What kind of
person do you want to work for? Try to be that person
yourself. When you are facing a decision, stand back and
ask yourself, “If I was my employee, what would I expect
me to do? If I was my boss, what would I expect me to
do?” Take yourself out of your body, as it were, and
look at the problem from the perspective of a
subordinate, a peer, and a superior. Armed with that
thought process, make the decision with which you are
most happy. Ninety percent of the time you’ll be just
fine. If you are right 90 percent of the time, I, as
your boss, will gladly take the 10 percent of the time
you are wrong.
General Peter Pace shakes hands with students after
class
(Photo by SSgt D. Myles Cullen, USAF)
RESEARCH REVIEW: Does Leadership Behavior in Teams
Matter?
By Mark
Hanna
Yogi Berra, the
fabled manager of the New York Yankees and the New York
Mets, once said, “The other teams could make trouble for
us if they win.” If Yogi’s wisdom is valid, a reasonable
next question is: What makes a team win, or at least
function well?
Leadership
researchers could refine the problem further by asking:
Do leadership behaviors contribute to functional team
outcomes, and if so, by how much? These are some of the
issues C. Shawn Burke of the University of Central
Florida and others explored in a June, 2006,
Leadership Quarterly article titled, “What type of
leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A
meta-analysis.” By statistically analyzing fifty
empirical studies on leadership behavior in team
situations, the study yielded insights beyond what could
be achieved with any single study.
Leadership
behavior and outcome variables
The researchers
first had to specify what was meant by “functional team
outcomes” and “leadership behaviors.” For outcome
variables, they looked at perceived team effectiveness,
team productivity, and team learning. For input
variables, they specified leadership behaviors in terms
of “task-focused” behaviors and “person-focused”
behaviors. They also looked at a moderator variable of
task interdependence, which could modify the
relationship between the input leadership behaviors and
functional team outcomes.
The two input
variables – along with their subgroup variables – and
the moderator variable were defined as follows:
Task-focused
behaviors:
o Transactional: praising,
rewarding, and withholding punishment from a subordinate
who complies with role expectations;
o Initiating structure: assigning
tasks, specifying methods, and minimizing role ambiguity
and conflict;
o Boundary-spanning: collaborating
with others outside the team, scanning the environment,
and negotiating resources for the team;
Person-focused behaviors:
o Transformational: providing
followers with a sense of purpose and values,
demonstrating concern for followers, providing
intellectual stimulation, and articulating a
inspirational vision along with a displayed optimism
that the vision will be achieved;
o Consideration: maintaining close
social relationships and group cohesion;
o Empowerment: coaching, monitoring,
providing feedback to followers in a participative,
consultative style to develop their self-management and
self-leadership skills;
o Motivation: promoting team members
exerting continued effort, especially in times of
difficulty;
Moderator
variable:
o Task interdependence: the degree
to which team members must depend on one another to
perform tasks and achieve goals.
Method
The authors
conducted electronic searches of computerized databases
using keywords relating to team leadership or group
leadership going back as far as 1900 and including up to
August, 2004. After applying various criteria for
relevance, they identified 231 published and unpublished
studies for potential inclusion in the meta-analysis.
The authors then
developed a coding scheme to quantify the study
characteristics and results. Two
industrial/organizational psychologists with high
inter-rater reliability were used to rate the studies,
and any disagreements about whether to include a study
were resolved by consensus.
After all the
coding and selection criteria were applied, the authors
came up with a final data set of 50 empirical studies
with 113 different effect sizes. The pooling and
analysis of the study findings was aided by the computer
program Comprehensive Meta-Analysis. In order to
aggregate findings across all 50 studies, all test
statistics were converted to an index of effect size,
which is designated with the letter “r.”
Results
Does leadership
behavior in teams matter? Results suggest the use of
task-focused behaviors is moderately related to
perceived team effectiveness (r = .333) and team
productivity (r = .203), accounting for 11
percent and 4 percent of outcome variance, respectively.
The relationship between task-focused behavior and team
learning could not be determined because the sample size
was too small. Person-focused behaviors were related to
perceived team effectiveness (r = .360), team
productivity (r = .284) and especially team
learning (r = .560), accounting for 13 percent, 8
percent, and a whopping 31 percent of variance,
respectively. All of these results were statistically
significant at the p<.001 level, which means the chances
of getting a test statistic as extreme as or more
extreme than that observed by chance alone, if the null
hypothesis H0 is true, was less than 1 in 1,000.
As far as the
subgroup variables were concerned, perceived team
effectiveness was most closely linked to leadership
boundary-spanning behavior (24 percent of outcome
variance) and empowerment behavior (22 percent of
outcome variance). Team productivity was most closely
linked to leadership empowerment behavior (10 percent of
outcome variance) and motivational behavior (9 percent
of outcome variance). Team learning was most closely
associated with person-focused leadership behavior (31
percent of outcome variance) and empowerment (31 percent
of outcome variance).
The results on
task interdependence were less clear due to small sample
sizes and effect sizes, but the authors suggest that:
“Leadership in teams is relatively
more important in achieving efficacious team performance
outcomes when task interdependencies are higher.
Therefore, as the dependencies between team members
increase, so too apparently does the importance of
leadership in orchestrating the adaptive coordination
required to achieve effective team outcomes.” (p. 299)
Final
Observations
The results of
this meta-analysis show that leadership behaviors – both
task and person-focused—do matter in team outcomes,
though they tend to account for only a small-to-moderate
portion of the variance. Nevertheless, every factor
counts in the final outcome. The lessons for leadership
educators and trainers interested in improving team
performance outcomes are evident. For perceived team
effectiveness, pay more attention to boundary-spanning
and empowerment behaviors. For team productivity,
emphasize empowerment and motivational behaviors. For
team learning, emphasize person-focused behaviors, and
especially empowerment behavior – coaching, monitoring,
giving feedback, encouraging participation, and
providing a strong sense of self-worth and
self-efficacy.
These
results lead us back to Yogi Berra, who observed, “In
theory there is no difference between theory and
practice. In practice there is.”
Note:
Mark Hanna is a freelance business writer based in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa. He can be reached at
markhanna@mchsi.com. The article’s complete
reference is: C. Shawn Burke, Kevin C. Stagl,
Cameron Klein, Gerald F. Goodwin, Eduardo Salas, Stanley
M. Halpin. “What type of leadership behaviors are
functional in teams? A meta-analysis.” The Leadership
Quarterly 17 (2006): 288-307. To obtain the article,
click
here. |
