Abstract: Research on organizational effectiveness highlights several key roles for successful leadership, including timely, clear communication; priorities shared within the context of a compelling vision; an identity that assures employees they are key contributors to a fulfilling legacy; an inclusive culture that welcomes and encourages diversity, fresh ideas, and investment in creative, reasonable risk-taking; and useful change. Briefly, maintaining creative tension between “valuing people” and “getting things done” represents a key strategy—always remembering that people triumph over policy. The most enduring organizations reflect these values, emphasizing people-centered strategies without sacrificing good stewardship of financial and other resources. Finally, aligning organizational values with the personal values of team members can persuade each of them that their roles make meaningful contributions to overall success. Jesus’s own ministry provides an example of this strategy.
Introductory Overview
“Do you see someone skilled in their work? They will serve before kings; they will not serve before officials of low rank” (Prov. 22:29, NIV). Although comprehensive in scope, this wisdom from Solomon urging diligence in one’s work undoubtedly includes effective leadership and implies its inevitable, far-reaching influence. This paper will explore how prioritizing a people-oriented, rather than strictly business-oriented, culture represents a useful strategy for successful leaders of spiritual, as well as secular, organizations and institutions. A personal anecdote will function to launch this exploration.
Following a major transition from associate professor of psychology at a parochial university on the West Coast to organizational behavior specialist at an international corporation headquartered in the Midwest, I faced a quandary. During an initial performance evaluation, my manager noted that customer reviews of my seminars on Ergonomics fell below their ratings of other sessions they had attended.1 Because of an extensive familiarity with preparing and delivering lectures, this negative assessment of my presumed skill level surprised me. As a university professor, I had mastered PowerPoint presentations and even occasionally used a few of its dynamic graphics tools to enliven otherwise detailed outlines and accurate, technical information. Sensitive, wounded pride urged a defense of my prowess and the credibility of the knowledge so skillfully presented to, in my view, somewhat naïve audiences.
Though not yet familiar with Carol Dweck’s (2007) wonderful insights about “growth” mindsets, I nevertheless decided how to improve those crucial audience appraisals through diligent effort and intentionality. Throughout the next year, my presentations emphasized creative speculation and mostly reasonable predictions about the future, rather than accurate summaries of existing theory and research. Industrial design colleagues explained the superiority of brevity and simplicity over comprehensiveness and technical accuracy—especially the power of visual images to communicate compared to text. Relevant pictures and rich metaphors thus replaced my organized outlines of mostly text, data, and graphs. Thankfully, perhaps due as much to more forgiving customer groups as to my enhanced presentations, audience ratings of my educational sessions improved dramatically, even though the facts and technical details of my content had changed very little.
What does this anecdote have to do with successful leadership within institutions and organizations? In addition to the necessity of humility for personal growth, it serves to highlight the importance of improving the quality of people’s experience in addition to paying careful attention to objective facts and information. The successful sharing of knowledge does not depend on content alone; effective communication thrives when it occurs between an enthusiastic source and a motivated audience—through well-articulated, shared contexts, and culturally appropriate symbols and iconography. For example, a president’s report to her or his board depends as much on its effective delivery as on the knowledge it conveys. The intent of a sales manager to elicit confidence in a product or service through sharing relevant information mingles with the expectations of the audience and the prior reputation of the company to determine the actual nature of what gets communicated. What employees believe about the importance of their roles influences how well they perform their various tasks and activities, how much of themselves they invest, and whether they find their jobs meaningful and fulfilling.
Due, in part, to this search for meaning along with financial concerns, people change careers 5–7 times during their working lives, holding from 10–15 different jobs in the process (Doyle, 2019). As an adjunct faculty member at three institutions, full-time faculty member at three institutions, and organizational behavior specialist and cognitive psychologist at a global company for 16 years, my experience perhaps falls a bit short of this level of professional variety. However, this snapshot of career volatility contrasts with the loyalty and longevity that many organizational and institutional leaders assume characterize their workforce. This difference between objective reality and common assumptions among leaders regarding job stability illustrates the importance of subjective aspects of experience in ultimately determining effective enterprises. Many of these crucial subjective factors include familiar terms, such as employee engagement, well-being, job satisfaction, impression management, organizational loyalty, expectations, and perceptions.
In this case, employee’s expectations and experiences prepare them for career mobility, although their leaders may have very different perceptions and expectations. As the well-known adage claims, “Perception is reality.” Yet too often, organizational leaders believe such vague, personal issues fall outside their strategic focus, when instead, prioritizing these elements of subjective experience usually holds the key to their successful leadership. This is true not only with regard to employee loyalty and longevity. As noted more than three decades ago by Peter Senge (1990), future competitive organizations will resemble learning communities that foster collaborative problem-solving and personal growth. In contrast to the command-and- control leadership style (e.g., Münsterberg, 1913) still too often witnessed even within apparently efficient organizations, Wheatley (2006) presciently described a new kind of leader to inspire such learning organizations—one who could notice and effectively respond to emerging, changing patterns within an ever-shifting context of global competition and cooperation. In addition, such a leader would notice these patterns even before they become distinct enough to capture everyone’s attention (i.e., while they remain “weak signals”) (Holopainen & Toivonen, 2012).
In light of the relevance of unpredictability, chaos theory, emergence, and “learning how to learn” for leadership in the 21st century, overly simplistic models and solutions might seem inadequate. Yet McGregor’s (1960) masterful contrast between “theory X” and “theory Y” of leadership still serves to guide us a full half century later. Whether leaders focus on nurturing people or accomplishing goals summarizes but one of many decisions clamoring for their attention. Nonetheless, because this choice reflects fundamental assumptions about human nature, it profoundly influences everything else leaders do. Relevant early research in the field characterized leaders as being primarily task-oriented, initiating structure, or nurturing (i.e., consideration) (Katz, Maccoby, & Morse, 1950). Later work (e.g., Stogdill & Coons, 1957) found that these leadership dimensions operated independently, leading to Blake and Mouton’s 1964 grid theory, which classified leadership along two, nine-point continua (“employee-oriented” or “task-oriented”) and applauded “9, 9” leaders—those rated high on both dimensions. However, pertinent to our discussion here, further research clarified that employee satisfaction related mostly to consideration improving under employee-oriented leaders (Schriesheim, House & Kerr, 1976; Larson, Hunt & Osburn, 1976; Nystrom, 1978; see Dipboye, Smith & Howell, 1994, for a review).
Contemporary Context
To lead our conversation toward its current manifestations, Andrea Gabor’s (2000) fascinating history paints the landscape as well as anyone. Gabor reviewed the influential contributions of Frederick Taylor (1919), Mary Parker Follett (1918), Chester Barnard (1968), Fritz Roethlisberger (e.g., Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1964) and Elton Mayo (e.g., Mayo, 1949), Robert McNamara (e.g., Shrader, 2008), Abraham Maslow (1968) and Douglas McGregor (1960), W. Edwards Deming (1986), Herbert Simon (1997), Alfred Chandler & Alfred Sloan (e.g., Sloan, 2003), and finally, Peter Drucker (2007). Although a thorough review of each of these thinkers extends beyond the current scope, it would require only minor qualifications to characterize each of their contributions as focusing primarily on either objective or subjective reality, on the observable conditions and context of business or the subjective experience of employees and customers. For example, Taylor’s (1919) concern with productivity led him to represent human beings as merely additional machinery in service to production. Although certainly more humanist than Taylor, Follett (1918) emphasized the degree to which business leaders could align with the so-called “social impulses of their time” as influential in the success of their organizations, which she viewed as social systems, presaging Barnard’s contributions.
Taylor’s mechanism, Follett’s humanism, and social context yielded the spotlight to Chester Barnard’s (1968) emphasis on persuasion and negotiation. Rather than order employees to fulfill company requirements, leaders should persuade them with strong rationales rooted in shared values. We will return to expand on Follett’s and Barnard’s insights later. Roethlisberger and Mayo (e.g., Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1964; Mayo, 1949) launched the human relations movement, which contrasted alike with Taylor’s (1919) engineering approach and McNamara’s (e.g., Shrader, 2008) subsequent emphasis on quantitative analysis and control. In prioritizing humanistic management, Maslow (1968) and McGregor (1960) returned the business leadership pendulum to the priorities of human relations. Deming (1986) championed quality and insisted that the characteristics of learning organizations need to be present to ensure high-quality products and services. Even though he focused on human beings, Simon (1997) represented cognition as general information processing, thus emphasizing its predictability and foreshadowing the ubiquitous, contemporary presence of artificial intelligence (AI) in analysis, problem solving, and decision-making.
Chandler and Sloan (e.g., Sloan, 2003) initiated the still-influential Sloan School of Business at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, combining Chandler’s (e.g., Chandler & Hikino, 1994) theory and strategy with Sloan’s practical insights from his long career at General Motors. Finally, Peter Drucker (2007) was and remains a source of wisdom for managers and leaders; this expertise was based on his comprehension of how corporations, organizations, and institutions provide identity for their employees, lending a sense of their contributing to something greater than themselves. The increasing emphasis on environmental stewardship reflects Drucker’s acumen. Again, I would argue that a helpful oversimplification of these business theorists’ ideas could categorize them as either focusing on scientific (objective) or humanistic (subjective) management practices. The former emphasizes predictability and uniformity; the latter accentuates individual idiosyncrasies and human motivation. Seemingly with each new generation of business leaders, one or the other of these emphases rises to prominence based on its valid critique of the “other”’ approach and demonstration of its own unique value.
Robert Quinn’s Competing Values Framework, CVF (Quinn, 2011) illustrates how these competing values—between a mechanistic focus on spreadsheets, processes, and systems (Taylor’s “scientific management,” 1919; McNamara’s [e.g., Shrader, 2008] financial forecasts) on one side of the pendulum and a social focus on higher-order needs such as identity and fulfillment (Roethlisberger and Mayo’s “human relations” [e.g., Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1964; Mayo, 1949]; Maslow and McGregor’s “theory Y” [e.g., McGregor & Cutcher-Gershenfeld, 2005]) on the other. Such foci might oscillate over time—even within the same corporation. Just as internally-focused values, such as community and collaboration, lead to complacency regarding externally-focused values such as customer complaints and opportunities, shifts from the subjective to the objective side of the enterprise and back again may be inevitable—especially as influenced by broader, macro-economic realities (e.g., socio-political context, supply and demand, access to an educated workforce).
Regarding this historical cycling between a mechanistic, system-view of corporations and an organic, psychosocial view, Gabor’s (2000) epilogue contains the following useful, germane wisdom: “To think of an organization as a mechanical device is to discount the value of human creativity and the possibility that organizations can foster a sense of purpose in an almost organic sense” (p. 327). Gabor (2000) also outlined the traits characterizing the longest-lived organizations, according to a Royal Dutch/Shell study (De Geus, 1997):
- Such organizations are sensitive to their environment.
- They are socially cohesive, with a strong sense of organizational “community” and identity—that is, they foster “a feeling of belonging to a social system” (Gabor, 2000, p. 328). Although lifetime employment is not a hard-and-fast rule, management is often chosen from within, and employee tenure is the rule, rather than the exception. At the same time, these companies are very selective about the individuals they admit into their midst, ensuring that longevity does not lead to complacency. While it may emerge that the values and needs of the company and an individual are “inharmonious” (Gabor, 2000, p. 328), the social contract in these companies affirms “that there is at least a statistical probability of lifetime employment” (Gabor, 2000, p. 328).
- These companies are also tolerant of internal processes of change. In particular, they are “tolerant of activities on the margin: outliers, experiments, and eccentricities within the boundaries of the cohesive firm” (Gabor, 2000, p. 328).
- They are financially conservative and focused on preserving capital. You might consider to what extent your institution or organization reflects these values.
Except for number four, the remaining three core values distinguishing long-lasting companies from more temporary ones reflect principles from the “people” side of enterprise, human relations, humanistic management, considerate leaders—all considered “soft skills” in most business contexts, more subjective than objective. Value number one reflects the spiritual principle of stewardship—caring for the earth we live on. This value gives employees the sense of contributing to something larger than themselves, perhaps even offering a transcendent experience (goals of which Peter Drucker would certainly approve). Value number two encompasses people’s need for identity—not just identity as an end in itself, but identity as connection to something meaningful, fulfilling, association with a supportive, nurturing community, and identification with collaborative accomplishment and shared success. Note also how values two and three both promote trust, an essential ingredient for employee well-being; additionally, value number three describes a work context that allows for reasonable levels of risk in service to the inevitable trial-and-error learning that fosters creativity and leads to innovation (learning organization of which Peter Senge could be proud!).
The Journal of Applied Christian Leadership is primarily concerned with the application of theory and research to improving leadership practice; we might thus contemplate the historical development of views about how best to lead organizations. In this regard, university professors and other academics tend to evaluate ideas in terms of date of publication, believing that more recent information invariably improves on previous efforts. Yet the level of adoption among organizational leaders of even great ideas may lag behind when those ideas become familiar to disciplinary experts. The process of editing a book by a Dutch executive, In China, We Trust (Stratenus, 2013), written in English for a Chinese audience, can serve to illustrate this point. Stratenus used a narrative style to recount his experiences as general manager of TNT China, a formerly public shipping/transportation company in the Netherlands that had been privatized prior to expanding globally. He described the transformation of his company’s culture through implementing the ideas of a boutique consulting firm, Reya Group. While carefully reading and editing his book manuscript, the realization dawned that essentially, all the insights offered in the book might easily be found in any undergraduate industrial-organizational psychology textbook.
Stratenus may well have represented the hard-won advice based on his experience as unique, when in fact, such notions have a rather long history, dating at least from Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1968) and McGregor’s (1960) application of Maslow’s concepts in developing his influential “theory X” and “theory Y” of management. This interpretation of the book’s insights as being previously available may have been factually correct, yet the author, having earned an MBA and JD in America with extensive experience as a senior executive, claimed that focusing on the “people side” of organizations represented a truly revolutionary idea among his peers. He, and most of the senior leaders he knew, assumed that being a successful executive primarily involved managing the profit and loss statement (familiar to decision-making senior executives) using a set of rational tools acquired in business school and protected by a competent knowledge of corporate law.
This brief article, contrasting policy-oriented with people-oriented organizations, attempts to enrich the practice of leadership with an understanding of relevant, available research. Otherwise, decades of useful investigation might well remain the sole province of academics rather than serving to enlighten the world of organizational and institutional leadership. Two more stories will hopefully suffice to provide an inflection point for this discussion, leading toward some practical implications.
First, Andrea Gabor (2000) uncovered a broader, fascinating context for Frederick Taylor’s (1919) data collection efforts in his attempt to provide evidence favorable to his theory of scientific management—an approach still covered in many industrial-organizational psychology textbooks. It seems that Taylor’s belief in the primacy of monetary incentives and time-motion efficiencies to increase the output of labor often ignored the role of supportive management and senior leaders’ concessions to their unions. When such congeniality between labor and management was lacking, Taylor’s methods seldom reached expectations.
In one episode, the human resource professionals placated their workers’ irritations over Taylor’s heavy-handed tactics, promising that things would return to normal after the scheduled two weeks of Taylor’s “experiments.” The rich, social contexts that Gabor provides for Taylor’s time-motion studies and differential rate incentive structures highlight the fact that people are not machines, in spite of Taylor’s considering them as such. Universal values such as respect, dignity, honor, and integrity held more influence over worker productivity than Taylor’s “principles of scientific management” (1919), and Gabor’s (2000) historical portraits emphasize this more humane, complex side of human nature in understanding the limits of employee output.
Another, more personal, story serves to underscore the importance of psychosocial experience for predicting behavior. B. F. Skinner (1976), the father of operant conditioning, derived quantitative models for behavior based on the schedule of its consequences. During my time at Loma Linda University, we included a laboratory in the learning and behavior class in which graduate students learned to train white rats under various conditions. According to Skinner’s behaviorism, contingencies of reinforcement, defined in the environment, largely determine behavior without consideration of an organism’s internal, subjective experience. However, although most students developed a friendly, almost pet-like relationship with their laboratory animals, a few students remained anxious—almost fearful—of encounters with their rats. The level of calm and relaxation evinced by students about their lab experiences was invariably reflected in the rats’ ability to be trained. Thus, the quality of psychosocial experience determined the effectiveness of learning, even for laboratory animals; the particular reinforcement schedule’s influence paled in comparison to this overwhelming contextual element.
Nonetheless, before we discount Skinner as irrelevant, we should remember the foolhardiness of expecting certain behaviors while rewarding others (Kerr, 1995). Over time, the consistent example of leaders can influence corporate culture, and thus the behaviors that leaders choose to notice and reward will tend to endure. For example, if leaders punish every instance of exceeding the budget and fail to applaud reasonable risk-taking in pursuit of creative client solutions, such consequences will tend to weaken personal motivation and discourage innovation. The attitudes (e.g., internal mood) and other aspects of subjective experience among employees largely determine whether their interactions with customers and fellow team members will be positive or negative (Amabile & Kramer, 2011). Over time, hiring for “cultural fit” rather than for specific skills or experience— assuming an adequate level of competence—will preserve a people-oriented culture and maintain its advantages (cf. Groysberg, Lee, Price, & Cheng, 2018).
Summary and Implications
This article will now close by offering some specific, practical insights that can help leaders implement a more people-focused culture in their organizations and institutions. First, leaders need to align important organizational/institutional goals with personal and universal values. Although mirroring Follett’s (1918) insight that organizations align with their social contexts, as well as Barnard’s (1968) acumen that leaders persuade rather than direct personnel, this concept of aligning corporate goals with generally accepted priorities may seem very abstract, so an example may help to clarify. An international corporation at which I was once employed often implemented corporate goals reflecting primarily financial performance. For instance, they might plan to increase the company’s year-over-year market share of office seating by 0.7%. Instead, guided by the insights from the human relations movement, my team suggested that, rather than such audacious avarice, the company might instead focus on the quality of users’ experiences sitting in their chairs. A promotional approach might rest on the claim, “We give retired users of our chairs the opportunity to joyfully hoist their grandchildren pain-free!” To be genuine, this statement would require evidence that lifetime users of those office chairs indeed endured less back pain compared to users’ experience with competitive alternatives. Additionally, it would entail a dedication to designing and producing safe, comfortable chairs that optimized the health and well-being of their users (cf. Bridger, 2018; Miller, Williams, & O’Neill, 2018; Hedge, 2017).
In any case, notice how this corporate strategy would harness general priorities like honesty, integrity, honoring grandparents, and respecting family. In achieving this goal, employees would pursue deeply meaningful personal values and have the opportunity to improve the quality of life for office workers everywhere—almost spiritual purposes that stretch beyond the employees themselves. Whereas the prospect of contributing to the company’s shareholders may fail to motivate all but senior executives, alignment with such universal values would encourage everyone else to spare no effort to achieve such a noble intention as respecting and honoring grandparents. Certainly, identifying with these transcendent values should be balanced with financial accountability and fiscal responsibility (the fourth distinguishing characteristic of enduringly successful firms; De Geus, 1997), but the available evidence would suggest that monetary success inevitably follows a commitment to people-centered culture and values and should not serve as an end in itself. A quote from one of my favorite books about the world’s greatest leader nicely summarizes this contention:
He reached the hearts of the people by going among them as one who desired their good….He met them at their daily vocations, and manifested an interest in their secular affairs….His strong personal sympathy helped to win hearts….It was by personal contact and association that Jesus trained His disciples….He linked their interest with His, and they united with Him in the work. (White, 1990, pp. 74, 75; emphasis added)
Second, communicating and encouraging trust represents another crucial aspect of effective organizational and institutional leadership. In addition to creating authentic community, to engender trust, leaders must empower people to collaboratively decipher how best to reach shared, consensus-based goals. Enabling people to pursue their passion and allowing them to be genuine also facilitate trust (O’Malley, 2019). Designing roles that align with employees’ interests and aptitudes, rather than requiring people to fulfill institutionally defined functions and activities, maintains such trust long term. However, the honesty and transparency in communication that demonstrates leaders’ trust in their team members must be balanced with that sense of confidence and assurance resulting from adequate buffering from the inexorable uncertainties and unpredictability of running a large, complex institution or organization. Shrewdness in understanding when, where, how often, to whom, and how much information to share constitutes a characteristic common to all great leaders. Merely a simplistic dedication to transparency (e.g., regarding everyone’s salary or budgetary constraints) does not automatically produce trust or security.
Third, a final task of any consistently successful leader—one focused on people rather than profit—involves creating a compelling vision of the future. Consistently narrating a hopeful scenario that prospectively defines success can inspire employees at every level to engage and contribute their best effort to ensure impeccable customer service and effective innovation. A familiar story told and retold many times pictures three men, ostensibly working on a shared task. However, when the narrator asks the first man, “Sir, what are you doing?” he replies, “Isn’t it obvious? I’m laying bricks.” Asked the same question, the second man responds, “I hope you can see that I’m building a wall; look how straight it is!” Finally, the interrogator turns to the third man with the same inquiry, and, with solemn import, he answers, “Although it may not yet be obvious, I’m erecting a cathedral!” A well-articulated, adequately inspiring future vision compelled the third man to greatness, and such motivation will lift any well-led organization or institution to the same level of aspiration.
Jay L. Brand, PhD, is a professor of leadership and organizational studies, as well as the director of the leadership PhD program, in the School of Leadership at Andrews University.
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1 This corporation often hosted fairly large project groups, consisting of customer representatives along with their architectural and design team, project manager, and others considered relevant by our regional sales team. These groups might spend a day or two at our corporate headquarters learning about our company’s operations through 30-minute or 1-hour presentations, seminars, workshops, and other similar sessions.