Human resource management practices in a postcolonial and post-9 ...

Description

1 Human resource management practices in a postcolonial and post-9/11 climate: empirical evidence from Pakistan. 1. Jhatial, Ashique Ali, Bradford University School of Management 2. Cornelius, Nelarine, Bradford University School of Management 3. Wallace James, Bradford University School of Management

• key positions of state administration
• regional quota system
• literature on the current state
• hrm policies
• multifaceted research problem
• colonial
• pakistan
• human resource management
• national culture
• government

Sujets

• Federal Public Service Commission
• Empire
• Colonial
• Pakistán
• Management
• Policy
• Regional

Informations

• Publié par: hulod
• Nombre de lectures: 13
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Arts of Leader ship
KEITH GRINT
11
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
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© Keith Grint 2000
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First published 2000
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Grint, Keith.
The arts of leadership / Keith Grint.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Leadership. I. Title.
HD57.7.G755 2000 658.49092—dc21 99–059957
ISBN 0–19–829445–X
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Typeset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
T. J. International Ltd.
Padstow, CornwallTo ‘an unknown w oman in Minsk’Contents
List of Figures and Table xii
1. Introduction: The Arts of Leadership 1
Part One. Parallel Leadership Situations
2. Crash-Landing and Take-Off: Business Leadership on Skytrain
and Virgin Atlantic 35
3. The Floating Republics: Political Leadership in the Spithead
and Nore Mutinies 71
4. Nursing the Media: Social Leadership in the Crimean and
English Hospitals 106
5. Scarlet and Black: Military Leadership at Isandhlwana and
Rorke’s Drift 156
Part Two. Situating Extreme Leaders
6. Henry Ford: The Blind Business Visionary 187
7. Horatio Nelson: Determining the Indeterminate Military Hero 225
8. Adolf Hitler: The Political Emotionasaurus Rex 289
9. Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream Speech’: The Rhetoric of Social
Leadership 359
10. The End of Leadership? 409
References 421
Index 4331
Introduction: The Arts of Leadership
Socratic Thinking about Leadership
In 1986, before I first began to study leadership in a serious manner, my knowl-
edge of it was complete. I knew basically all there was to know and I had already
spent over a decade practising it as a senior representative of a trade union in
England. I should have stopped then, because ever since that time my under-
standing has decreased in direct proportion to my increased knowledge: in effect,
the more I read, the less I understood. This was partly to do with a Socratic prob-
lem: the more I read, the more I realized how ignorant I was. But there was some-
thing else at work: the more I read, the more contradictory appeared the
conclusions I came to. Despite all my best efforts to analyse the data as objec-
tively as possible and to run the numbers past as many sophisticated statistics as
I could manipulate, the results refused to regurgitate any significant pattern
except one banal truism: successful leaders are successful. In 1997, at the start of
the research project in which this book has its origins, I stopped trying to read
everything about leadership and began to try and think through the implications
of my problem. And at this point, when I had ceased my quest for information,
and started my quest for understanding, a light of some form began to emerge.
Fig. 1.1 reproduces my efforts at understanding leadership since the beginning of
my studies.
100
Knowledge
Understanding
80
60
40
20
0
1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000
Fig. 1.1. Socrates, information, and leadership2 INTRODUCTION:THE ARTS OF LEADERSHIP
That light was not an answer but a series of questions that undermined what -
ever faith I had previously had in traditional ‘objective’ forms of analysis. In
general these comprise three approaches that remain popular in the
conventional literature: trait approaches, contingency approaches, and situa-
tional approaches. The fourth approach, constitutive, forms the basis of this
book. These are summarized in Fig. 1.2. In the trait approach, the ‘essence’ of the
individual leader is critical but the context is not. Thus, providing we select the
right leader with the appropriate leadership traits, everything should be plain
sailing on our metaphorical journey. In short, a leader is a leader under any cir -
cumstances and it is more than likely that such traits are part of the individual’s
genetic make-up—otherwise the circumstances of the situation that faced the
individual at some time in his or her life would have had an infl uence upon his or
her leadership ‘traits’. This kind of model implies that organizations should con -
cern themselves with the selection of leaders rather than their development,
though traits can, presumably, be honed, just as one’s singing can be improved
through training or one’s athletic ability can be improved. However, since—in
this approach—you cannot ‘make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’, there is no hope
for those of us not born with certain gifts or talents for leadership.
Non-essentialist
ConstitutiveSituational
Individual
TraitContingent
Non-essentialistEssentialist
Context
Fig. 1.2. Essentialist and non-essentialist leadership
In the contingency approach, both the essence of the individual and the context
are knowable and critical. Here one would expect individuals to generate an
awareness of their own leadership skills and of the context so that they can com -
pute the degree of alignment between themselves and the context. Where the per -
mutation of the two suggests a high level of alignment—for instance, where a
strong leader and a crisis situation coincide—then the leader should step into the
breach, only to step out when the situation changes and the context is no longer
conducive to his or her vigorous style. Self-awareness and situational analysis areINTRODUCTION:THE ARTS OF LEADERSHIP 3
the two developmental areas for such approaches to concentrate upon and, pro -
viding these are carried out satisfactorily, we will get to our destination.
The third variant, the situational approach, reproduces the essentialist posi-
tion with regard to the context—certain contexts demand certain kinds of lead -
ership—so we do need to be very clear about where we are. However, in this
model the leader may be fl exible enough to generate a repertoire of styles to suit
the particular situation. In effect, the leader’s actions and behaviour change to
suit the situation. Consequently, development work is required both in terms of
situational analysis and in terms of expanding the variety or versatility of the
leader. Here, the leader’s methods for getting us from A to B will vary infi nitely,
but we should still get to B.
The final, and most recent, model here, the constitutive approach, questions
the significance of the allegedly objective conditions that surround leaders and
implies that the ‘conditions’ are as contested as any other element. For example,
contingency models suggest that, under certain conditions, a particular form of
leadership is most appropriate—that is, a crisis requires ‘firm’ leadership. But
the problem with this is twofold. First, it is no different from the scientifi c-
management approach pursued by F.W. Taylor at the beginning of the century in
which ‘the one best way’ of organizing production became synonymous with
good management—and leadership. But Taylor was never able to prove what
this best way was, nor can contingency theory. Secondly, and the probable rea -
son for the problem, what counts as a ‘situation’ and what counts as the ‘appro -
priate’ way of leading in that situation are interpretive and contestable issues, not
issues that can be decided by objective criteria. This might sound counter-
intuitive—for example, surely in war we know when a crisis exists? Yet one
argument for leadership would be that those people who can operate calmly
because they do not consider the situation to be critical—while the rest ‘lose their
heads’ because they perceive a catastrophe about to happen—will provide the
most successful forms of leadership. Take, for example, an air raid on a group of
soldiers: is this not a crisis? Would we not expect the appropriate behaviour of
successful leaders to be screaming at the troops to return fi re at best or at least to
scatter and diving for cover oneself? Yet, when Patton’s Third Army was north of
Avranches in 1944, a Luftwaffe at