Choosing Leaders: A Group Interactional Approach

Abstract

Executive Summary This article advances a theoretical framework for understanding how groups evaluate leaders using insights from small group research. Leadership selection is presented as an interactional involving the variables of personality, group, and situation. All groups expect their leaders to perform two basic leadership functions depending on the situation -- what we describe as instrumental and affective leadership roles. The instrumental and affective dimensions of presidential leadership are delineated to provide a more complete picture of the leadership roles parties and voters desire as they nominate and elect presidents. While the focus is on the selection of American presidents, the framework advanced is readily applicable to the selection of leaders in groups of all sizes. ********** The study of presidential selection in America is alive and well. Using a variety of different approaches, students of the presidency have focused on ambition and rational choice theories, institutional rules of the nominating game, campaign strategies, voter choice, partisan voting, issue voting, retrospective voting, candidate evaluation, and the relationship between campaigns and governance (Aldrich 1993). Although each approach focuses on some aspect of the leadership selection process, political science lacks an overarching framework that places these contributions in their proper perspective and indicates their relative importance to an understanding of the presidential selection process. This article advances a theoretical framework to provide such a perspective. The insights put forward are taken from political science, sociology, social psychology, and in particular from small group leadership theory. The focus will not be on the methodological problems of applying insights from small group studies to larger groups. Sidney Verba, in his landmark study Small Groups and Political Behavior (1961), has already addressed that threshold issue. We instead concentrate on two theoretical contributions from small group leadership theory directly relevant to our understanding of how we choose leaders. First, this work recognizes that leadership selection is an interactional process involving the variables personality, the group, and the situation. Second, this work points out the two basic leadership functions every group expects its leader to perform -- the instrumental and affective leadership functions. Our work combines these important insights from research on small groups into a broader theoretical framework for analyzing the selection of the president in particular and group leaders in general. Interactional Leadership Theory If one traces the evolution of thought among social scientists regarding leadership, one finds that early scholars tended to dwell on what we today would call the Great Man theory of leadership (see, for example, Gouldner 1950). According to this view, if we could identify the specific personality traits that made a leader and find a contemporary person with similar traits, then we would have identified a great leader. The Great Man theory was replaced as scholars recognized that the situational context out of which a leader emerged was just as important, if not more so, than any personal traits a leader may have possessed. To put their case bluntly and simply, no Moses would have emerged as a leader without the Jewish people yearning to be free from Egyptian bondage. It was the situational context, according to these scholars, that explained the emergence of the leader (Golembiewski 1978; Gouldner 1950). More recently, social psychologists have come to the consensus that a third variable, the group, is at work in the leadership selection process. Small group research focuses on the interaction between the personality of the leader, the group's beliefs, norms, needs, hopes and fears, and the situation confronting the group (Stodgill 1974). …