Using SPSS to Understand Research and Data Analysis.

4.5 The Second Set of Predictor Variables: Leadership Style & Work Motives

Below we discuss the research relating to the second predictor, Leadership Style, and describe the measures used to assess leadership style. Then we will turn our attention to Work Motives.

• 4.5a Defining & Measuring Leadership Style

Research on leadership effectiveness has indicated that people differ in their preferred Leadership Style. The two main categories of leadership style are Relations orientation and Task orientation (Feidler, Chemers, & Mahar, 1976). Relations-oriented leaders gain satisfaction from interpersonal relationships, while task-oriented leaders gain satisfaction from task accomplishment.

Relations-oriented leaders attempt to maintain high productivity by promoting good interpersonal relationships among subordinates, whereas task-oriented leaders attempt to maintain productivity by arranging working conditions such that the human element interferes to a minimal degree. Thus, relations-oriented leaders have strong social skills, while task-oriented leaders have strong task skills. Examples of the types of behaviors representing these skills are shown in Table 4.2.

Research shows that each of these leadership styles is likely to be effective in some situations, but ineffective in others. However, just as we saw with masculinity/femininity, even though many managers are either primarily relations or task oriented in their leadership styles, Blake & Mouton (1980) suggested that it is possible for a person to exhibit high levels of both social skills and task skills in her/his leadership style.

Blake and Mouton (1980) developed a questionnaire that yields separate scores for a person's social skills and task skills. To simplify, we will assume that EZ employees completed this instrument, and each employee received a score from 1 to 9 indicating his/her degree of social and task skills. Thus, the next two variables in our data file will be Social Skills and Task Skills (which we will name soc and task in the file).

The range of scores on the soc variable is as follows:

• 1 = Low Social Skills
• 9 = High Social Skills.

The same scoring system will be used to measure task:

• 1 = Low Task Skills
• 9 = High Task Skills

If you have been thinking about the possible connections among the variables described above, good for you - you are showing the curiosity that makes for a good researcher! For example, you may have considered the possibility that masculine sex-typed employees might score high on task skills and low on social skills, while feminine sex-typed individuals might score low on task skills and high on social skills.

Further, you may have anticipated that the male employees at EZ Manufacturing are likely to perceive themselves as task-oriented, while female employees are likely to see themselves as relations-oriented.  These intuitive predictions follow from cultural stereotypes regarding the personality and behavior of men and women.

However, you might also think about how androgynous men and women score on the task and relations dimensions of leadership style. Only the data from your study can suggest the accuracy of your predictions, and we will test such hypotheses in subsequent chapters of this book.