Style, Structure, and Setting in Organizational Leadership

The concept of leadership, essential to an understanding of organizational functioning, has to do most directly with managerial and coordination activities, but it ramifies to many other activities as well.' To claim them all for leadership would be sheer imperialism. A variety of organizational processes are explicable in terms other than leadership, such as maintenance processes which implicate pressures toward conformity, cohesiveness, and morale, or psychological processes which involve the expected and attainable rewards individuals seek. In these and other aspects of organizational functioning, the kind of enterprise and its task setting also present important variables for attention and analysis. Nevertheless, the study of leadership does provide a useful framework within which to see organizational events more coherently. Increasingly, its study has come to be focused on a system of relationships rather than solely on the leader's attributes and actions. This distinction between the leadership process and the leader is a significant outgrowth of the so-called situational approach. The characteristics of the leader, as a person occupying a central role in this process, are inportant precisely because that role carries a greater potential for initiative and influence. But the effects of these characteristics, especially with regard to style, must be gauged in light of the attributes and perceptions of the led and of the structure and setting within which the leader and followers interact for the achievement of specifiable organizational ends. As a convenience, the terms style, structure, and setting are helpful in making these elements explicit. Much of the work on organizational leadership has revealed a concern with