Instrumental Values and the Popularity of Instrumental Leaders

Abstract

Varying degrees of overlap between instrumental and expressive hierarchies have been reported. All hypothesis which accounts for such disparity is that degree of correspondence between leader status and popularity is associated with the extent to which the instrumental activities of a group are dominant values for the group. Primary and secondary analyses provide confirmation. T HE relationship between leadership and popularity hierarchies has received considerable discussion. Only recently, however, has attention shifted from simply reporting the degree of correspondence between status in the one hierarchy and status in the other to specifying the conditions associated with varying degrees of such correspondence. The present paper hypothesizes how one such condition variable operates and presents some supporting evidence gathered both from primary and secondary data. Theodorson' has written that leader status and popularity are more likely to be associated with one another under conditions of high group cohesiveness than under conditions of low group cohesiveness. However, the reasons he gave for variable cohesiveness in the groups he studied can give rise to an alternative explanation of his findings. Theodorson suggested that a pair of marital discussion groups differed in extent of mutual liking, enjoyment of meetings, and loyalty as a consequence of different rates of interest in the manifest purpose of such groups. He attributed differential cohesiveness in a pair of political discussion groups to differential opportunity to deviate from manifest purposes. This information can lead to the conclusion implied by Theodorson, that the popularity of instrumental leaders is a function of cohesiveness, which in turn is a function of the group's acceptance of the activity led. It can lead equally well, however, to an inference advanced by the present writer, that cohesiveness and the popularity of instrumental leaders may co-occur only insofar as both are consequences of the group's acceptance of the activity led. Slater and Bales and Slater2 report somewhat greater association between indices of instrumental leader status and accorded liking in groups where there is high consensus in the attribution of leader status than in groups where such consensus is low. They suggest that latent consensus in critical values may have existed in the groups which were high in status consensus. We might speculate whether such critical consensus may not have been with respect to the acceptability of the group's