Effective Leadership

Most researchers evaluate effective leadership in term of the consequences of the leader's actions for followers and other organization stakeholders. Many different types of outcomes have been used, including the performance and growth of the leader's group or organization, its preparedness to deal with challenges or crises, followers satisfaction with the leader, follower commitment to the group objectives, the psychological well-being and development of followers, the leader's retention of high status in the group, and the leader's advancement to higher positions of authority in the organization.
The most commonly used measure of leader effectiveness is the extent to which the leader's organizational unit performs its task successfully and attains its goals.

The attitude of followers towards the leader is another common indicator of leader effectiveness. How well does the leader satisfy their need and expectations? Do followers like, respect, and admire the leader? Are followers strongly committed to carrying out the leader's requests, or will they resist, ignore, or subvert them?

Leader effectiveness is occasionally measure in term of the leader's contribution to the quality of group processes, as perceived by followers or by outside observers. Does the leader enhance group cohesiveness, member cooperation, member motivation, problem solving, decision making, and resolution of conflict among member? Does the leader contribute to the efficiency of role specialization, the organization of activities, the accumulation of resources, and the readiness of the group to deal with change and crises? Does the leader improve the quality of work life, build the self confidence of followers, increase their skills, and contribute to their psychological growth and development?

It is difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of a leader when there are so many alternative measures of effectiveness, and it is not clear which measure is most relevant. Some researchers attempts to combine several measures into a single, composite criterion, but the approach requires subjective judgments about how to assign a weight to each measure. Multiple criteria are especially troublesome when they are negatively correlated. A negative correlation means that trade-off occur among criteria, such that as one increases, others decrease. For example, growth in sales and market share (by reducing price and increasing advertising) is sometimes achieved at the cost of lower profits. An increase in production output (by including people to work faster) is sometimes achieved at the cost of lower product quality. Rapid growth is sometimes achieved (by financing expansion with excessive debt) at the cost of a weaker financial condition that may result in bankruptcy if economic conditions suddenly worsen. Efficiency may be increased (by using more specialization) at the expense of flexibility.
By Gary Yukl