Common reasoning is that leadership is a trait of the person; a matter of personality, experience, ability and competence. If a manger doesn’t function, personal reasons often are sought, management coaching or a leadership course prescribed.
A short course in for example transformational has been proven to increase leadership effectiveness. But what if the problem sometimes lie in the leadership working conditions, rather than manager’s personal ability to do the job? That the resources and demands experienced by managers put up such boundary conditions that exemplary leadership desired is hard to perform in practice?
That seems to be the case sometimes within Swedish municipalities, according to a recently published peer-reviewed scientific article by myself and leadership professor Erik Berntson at the Swedish Defense University. The study included several hundred managers in a Swedish municipality, grouping them into clusters with similar working conditions.
The managers who had the worst working conditions were more stressed, had worse health, had larger problems with recovering from work, had slightly less motivation and: performed different important leadership behaviors to a lesser extent. That included transformational leadership (being present in operations and encourage participation), as well as transactional leadership facets (control/follow-up). They however did not differ in terms of for example how long experience as a manager; more experience did not act as a shield against worse working conditions.
The results may someway seem obvious: more busy managers have less time and space to act as exemplary leaders. But nonetheless – how often do organizations actively try to improve working conditions for managers in order to better their ability to perform as leaders? And how often are new steering signals and new tasks added, without others being removed?
Read the full article in Nordic Psychology (open access).