Nuances of Leadership Effectiveness: Challenges of Context and Demographics

Abstract

Factors such as vision, articulation, rational intelligence, emotional intelligence, and spiritual intelligence impact leadership effectiveness. Does the effectiveness depend on the work context and the followers demographics? If it does depend on the context and demographics then the singularity of the construct becomes debatable. So it becomes all the more important for persons in the leadership role to understand the subtleties. In this research employees of two different sectors (IT and non-IT) participated to indicate their perception about leadership effectiveness (LE). In the first phase of the research dimensions of LE were identified through Lens model and subsequently administered to equal number of respondents from IT and non-IT sectors. The data was analyzed for commonality, differences and relationships. The results indicate that non-IT employees perceive a greater degree of leader vision and articulation scores compared with IT employees. Age of the employee is found to be negatively related to vision, articulation, and emotional intelligence dimensions of LE. Employees education is significantly related to vision only in the group of IT participants. It is unrelated to other variables. Finally, work experience and organizational experience of participants are found to be unrelated to psychological variables. The findings indicate a greater reporting of articulation in case of non-IT leader. Mismatch between the age of the followers and age of the leaders is likely to be a root cause of the negative relationship between age and vision as revealed in the findings of the present investigation. The relationship between the followers age and leaders articulation is found to be negative. Age is also found to be inversely related to employees perception of leaders emotional intelligence. The sector profile perhaps explains why the non-IT participants have not reported any association of significance between education and vision in the present investigation. The present investigation has the unique feature of deriving the pertinent dimensions instead of imposing a-priori dimensions.