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The Development of Leadership
Leadership is an ancient yet enduring concept that has found its expression in every arena in society since the dawn of humanity. One may find examples of leadership at any time and in all places across the globe, especially in cooperative, social settings. As early as the preschool years, children begin developing and demonstrating leadership, especially during social play with their peers in group settings (e.g., Parten, 1933; Trawick-Smith, 1988). Yet, the current academic discourse concerning leadership and leadership behaviors concentrates predominantly on the experience of adults (i.e., educators) (e.g., Fonsén & Ukkonen-Mikkola, 2019; Halpern et al., 2021; Hujala et al., 2016), partly on that of youth (e.g., F. Karnes & Bean, 1996; Oakland et al., 1996; Roach et al., 1999), and with only minor attention on that of young children, especially those of preschool ages (e.g., Chen & Kacerek, 2021; Parten, 1933). Particularly, with respect to leadership in early childhood education, the tendency to focus on teachers (e.g., pedagogical leadership) (e.g., Carroll-Lind et al., 2016; Fonsén & Ukkonen- Mikkola, 2019; Palaiologou & Male, 2019) is understandable, especially considering that teachers play a critical role in facilitating high-quality learning experiences for young children. While acquiring leadership skills themselves, teachers should also, in turn, nurture leadership capacities in young children as a key element of high-quality educational experiences for them. The question is, how?
Quiz
Week1:
Murphy, S.E., & Reichard, R.: chapter 1; the correlated traits, characteristics, and abilities of a leader is presented. None of them should be a prerequisite but might be a necessity to define leadership. The general portrait of a leader development is described. What are those factors or context that induce the leadership behaviours and characteristics?
The development of the self: why developmental and social psychology approaches are necessary for a clear and thorough understanding of the development of leadership.
[Erik-H.-Erikson]-Identity_-Youth-and-Crisis
There are many formulations of what constitutes a "healthy" personality in an adult. But if we take up only one-in this case, Marie Jahoda's definition, according to which a healthy personality actively masters his environment, shows a certain unity of personality, and is able to perceive the world and himself correctly it is clear that all of these criteria are relative to the child's cognitive and social development. In fact, we may say that childhood is defined by their initial absence and by their gradual development in complex steps of increasing differentiation.
Personality, therefore, can be said to develop according to steps predetermined in the human organism's readiness to be driven toward, to be aware of, and to interact with a widening radius of significant individuals and institutions.
Week 2:
The development of the self:
Play styles of boys and girls
Boys and girls tend to play differently and prefer different playthings (Goldstein, 1992; Moller, Hymel & Rubin, 1992). In a study of the games of American boys and girls, Lever (1978) concluded that the games played by boys were more complex, with a
larger number of roles, more participants, and more explicit goals, and more often involved the formation of teams. Moller et al. (1992) also found more group play among 7- to 9-year-old boys than among girls, as well as more functional and exploratory play.
Lever writes that these differences in play may contribute to sex differences in adulthood in such areas as competition, leadership, and styles of human relationships.
[Jeffrey-H.-Goldstein]-Toys,-Play,-and-Child-Devel
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The fate of childhood identifications, in turn, depends on the
child's satisfactory interaction with trustworthy representatives
of a meaningful hierarchy of roles as provided by the generations
living together in some form of family. [Erik-H.-Erikson]-Identity_-Youth-and-Crisis
In psychology, social identity theory, as the school of thought following Tajfel is called, is outside of the mainstream. A prominent psychologist once explained to me why. He said that the goal of the mainstream of psychology is to deduce how people think. As expressed by Nisbett and Ross, people are amateur scientists, who have “models” of how the world operates. The role of the psychologist is to deduce what those cognitive processes are, and how they differ from the thinking of real scientists. But this view of psychology rules out the possibility that people may have exactly the right model of how the world works, but want to do things that are peculiar to their group. Because it explores the nature of the we’s that people ascribe to, and the way in which these group memberships affect how they want to behave, social identity theorizing thus takes a very different perspective from mainstream psychology.
if one can inspire people to want to travel in a given direction, then they will continue to act even in the absence of the leader. If one is seen as articulating what people want to do, then each act of persuasion increases the credibility of the leader and makes future persuasion both more likely and easier to achieve. In other words, instead of being self-depleting, true leadership is self-regenerating.
If leadership centers on the process of influence—if, in the words of Robert Cialdini, it is about “getting things done through others” (2001, p. 72)—then, in order to understand it, we need to focus on the mental states and processes that lead people to listen to leaders, to heed what they have to say, and to take on the vision of the leader as their own.
our approach is situated within a tradition that argues that the operation of psychological processes always depends upon social context (Israel & Tajfel, 1972).
In the case of leadership, there are a range of social and contextual factors that impact upon a leader’s capacity to influence others. Most importantly perhaps, these include (a) the culture of the group that is being led, as well as that of the broader society within which that group is located, (b) the nature of the institutions within which leadership takes place (e.g., whether, to use Aristotle’s taxonomy, those institutions are democracies, aristocracies, or monarchies), and (c) the gender of leaders themselves. All of these factors are important in their own right. At various points in the analysis, we will also demonstrate how they impinge on the influence process.
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The New Psychology of Leadership (Platow, Michael J., Reicher, Stephen D., Haslam, S. Alexander;Stephen D. Reicher;Michael J. Platow)
The division of we and they is therefore one of the most important features of human psychology. It is no coincidence that it should lie at the heart of the psychology of leadership, because understanding and engaging with such distinctions is basic to what leadership is all about.
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The New Psychology of Leadership (Platow, Michael J., Reicher, Stephen D., Haslam, S. Alexander;Stephen D. Reicher;Michael J. Platow)
leadership is all about: it is about the interaction between the motivation and actions of the followers and the leader—and that motivation is mediated by how those followers think of themselves, and, correspondingly, how they define their goals.
effective leadership is always about how leaders and followers come to see each other as part of a common team or group – as members of the same in-group. It therefore has little to do with the individuality of the leader and everything to do with whether they are seen as part of the team, as a team player, as able and willing to advance team goals. Leadership, in short, is very much a “we thing.”
Different analyses place an emphasis on the importance of different traits. For Socrates the defining characteristics of a great leader were quickness of learning, good memory, courage, and broadness of vision, as well as physical presence and prowess. Distilled into contemporary psychological thinking, these ideas are typically related to mental qualities such as decisiveness, insight, imagination, intelligence, and charisma. Of these, it is the last—charisma—that has received the most intense scrutiny. In many ways, this is because the idea of charisma captures particularly well the sense of “something special” surrounding great leaders and our relationship with them.
the desire to discourage others from challenging the legitimacy of their authority may explain why those who occupy leadership positions often enthusiastically endorse highly individualistic models of leadership
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The New Psychology of Leadership (Platow, Michael J., Reicher, Stephen D., Haslam, S. Alexander;Stephen D. Reicher;Michael J. Platow)
Following self-categorization theory’s meta-contrast principle, we suggested that any individual group member will be seen to be more representative of a group (and hence more influential within it) to the extent that, in any given context, his or her characteristics are seen to embody both (1) what “we” have in common and (2) what makes “us” different from “them.” Consistent with this analysis, we reviewed a range of studies that demonstrated not only that the most in-group prototypical group members are the most influential, but also that, given a choice, their fellow group members will often favor leaders who display in-group prototypical characteristics ahead of those who display qualities that are simply stereotypical of leaders in general.
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The New Psychology of Leadership (Platow, Michael J., Reicher, Stephen D., Haslam, S. Alexander;Stephen D. Reicher;Michael J. Platow)
social identification constitutes the psychological process that makes group behavior possible (Turner, 1982). This happens in two ways. First, when a number of people come to share a common social identity, the social relations between them are transformed so as to allow them to work together and coordinate their efforts (for reviews of relevant literature, see Haslam, 2001; Hogg & Terry, 2001; Reicher et al., 2010; Turner et al., 1987; van Knippenberg & Hogg, 2003). They expect and seek to reach agreement, they respect and trust each other, they help and support each other, they seek contact and engagement with each other. In this way, as we saw in Figure 3.2, shared social identity ensures that group members constitute a coherent social force with greater power to realize their shared goals. However, social identity does not just facilitate collaboration, it also determines how people collaborate and what they collaborate on. Second, then, those who identify themselves as group members seek to base their behavior on the norms, beliefs, and values associated with the relevant group (and hence those with a shared social identification will act together on the basis of the same norms, beliefs, and values). Another way of putting this is to say that in the process of becoming a group its members engage in a process of self-stereotyping: that is, people ascertain the terms of the group definition (what it means to be “us”; to be American, a Catholic, a Conservative, or whatever) and then seek to conform to these norms. Of course, these terms may not always be clear—indeed, we would argue that they are never absolutely clear. Hence it becomes important to understand the process through which they become clear, since this will determine how (and whether) members act collectively. In this way, the notion of self-stereotyping—the development of a shared sense of “us”—becomes the basis for a model of influence and of leadership (Turner, 1991). This model speaks to the three core issues of social influence. First, who is influential (the source)? Second, who is influenced (the target)? Third, what is influential (the content)? The source of influence is anybody who can help elucidate the nature of group identity and its implications for how group members should act in context. As we argued in the previous two chapters, this will be someone who exemplifies the group identity—that is, someone who is prototypical of the in-group. Thetarget of influence is constituted by all those who, in the given context, define themselves in terms of the relevant social identity. For example, in appealing to “my fellow Americans,” a politician is, of course, only of appeal to those who are currently thinking of themselves as American. The same goes for the appeal of any source. It will be as wide (but only as wide) as the boundaries of social identification. Finally, the content of influence will be constrained by the meanings associated with the social identity. This goes against many models that suggest that people in a group can be made to do virtually anything so long as someone tells them what to do forcibly enough, simply enough, and often enough (for a review, see Turner, 1991). It means, for example, that an appeal to Scottish people must be seen as consonant with the values of Scottishness if it is to be effective.
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The New Psychology of Leadership (Platow, Michael J., Reicher, Stephen D., Haslam, S. Alexander;Stephen D. Reicher;Michael J. Platow)