A Longitudinal Analysis of Relationships Among Leader Behavior and Subordinate Performance and Satisfaction.

Leadership has long been considered a crucial element of a manager's role and thus an important determinant of organizational effectiveness. Much of the importance attributed to leadership stems from the presumed effect of a leader's behavior on his subordinates' performance and satisfaction. Empirical evidence for this argument has come largely from the numerous field studies which have investigated the relationships among leadership styles (e.g., initiating structure and consideration) and subordinate performance and satisfaction. The problem which arises from this research and, for that matter, with virtually all of the field research which has examined these relationships is one of interpretation. The research design and analytical method employed in these studies, static correlational analysis, provides little basis for inferring causality. For example, a highly significant static correlation between leader initiating structure and subordinate performance indicates only that the two variables are related. The leader's initiating structure may have caused variance in subordinate performance or, conversely, changes in subordinate performance may have caused variance in the leader's initiation of structure. Third, there may have been no causal relationship between the two variables; the correlation may have been spurious or a third or additional variables may have caused the two variables in question to covary. Static correlational analysis, unfortunately, provides too little information to evaluate any of these alternative explanations of the significant, correlation.