Assessing leaders: How positive style research produce causal illusions

An article co-authored by GSEM Professor Thomas Fischer as well as HEC Lausanne Professors Joerg Dietz, and John Antonakis was published in The Leadership Quarterly, a top-tier journal. Through four experiments, this work uncovers a flaw in the research on positive leadership styles such as authentic, ethical, and servant leadership. The authors argue that these styles confuse leaders’ behaviors and observers’ evaluations, leading to illusory correlations between behaviors and outcomes. Thus, their findings suggest that current constructs and measures of positive leadership styles are problematic and call for a radical reorientation of leadership style research using clean conceptualizations and pure behavioral measures.

ABSTRACT

We argue and show empirically that constructs and measures of positive leadership styles, such as authentic, ethical, and servant leadership, are not veridical representations of leadership behaviors. Instead, these styles conflate behaviors with subjective evaluations of leaders. Labelling behaviors as, for example, “ethical” means evaluating leadership behaviors on positively valenced terms rather than describing these behaviors. Across four experiments, we show that positive leadership styles are outcomes that depend on non-behavioral, evaluative factors, such as information about a leader’s previous success or value alignment between leaders and followers. More importantly, the measures of these leadership styles create causal illusions by spuriously predicting objective outcomes, even when leader behaviors and other leader-specific factors are kept constant. Furthermore, these measures have predictive properties similar to those of a purely evaluative measure of leadership. In conclusion, our studies cast serious doubts on previous research claiming that positive leadership styles cause positive outcomes. Moreover, positive leadership style research is not only wrong but also practically futile because its constructs and measures are amalgams that do not isolate concrete and learnable behaviors. We call for a radical reorientation of leadership style research and sketch out options for more solid future research.

Access the study: A fatal flaw: Positive leadership style research creates causal illusions

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