Katz and Kahn (1978) defined leadership as "an influential increment over and above compliance with routine directives of the organization" (p. 528). Methodological shortcomings in previous tests of this concept prohibit meaningful interpretation of the results. If found to be useful, this definition of leadership has important implications for both the study and application of leadership principles.
The purpose of the present research was twofold: (1) to test whether incremental influence accounts for unique variance in the dependent measures after controlling for the organizational sources of power; (2) to explore the contribution of both leader behavioral influence strategies and subordinate attributions of leader power to subordinate reasons for complying with the leader's requests.
A field study was conducted in which five bases of leader power were used: expert, referent, reward, legitimate and coercive. Incremental Influence was defined as compliance based on the leader's expert and referent power. Subordinate attributions of a leader's power were assessed using the Attributed Power Index (Holzbach, 1974), which measures the same five bases of power. Leader Influence Strategies were assessed by the Kipnis and Schmidt (1980) Managerial Influence Profile, which measures seven behavioral influence strategies: Friendliness, Bargaining, Reason, Coalitions, Higher Authority, Sanctions, and Assertiveness.
The usefulness of Incremental Influence was tested using a hierarchical regression framework. As predicted, results showed that Incremental Influence accounted for unique variance in measures of subordinate satisfaction and multiple source ratings of leader effectiveness.
The relationship of both strategies and attributed power to the reasons for compliance also were tested with hierarchical regression procedures. The use of Reason (as rated by subordinates) was found to be a significant predictor of compliance based on both expert and referent power, while the use of Assertiveness predicted compliance based on the organizational sources of power.
Attributed Power was found not to moderate the relationship between influence strategies and reasons for compliance, as had been predicted. Rather, both attributed leader power and the strategies leaders are perceived to use contributed independently to reasons for compliance.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:RICE/oai:scholarship.rice.edu:1911/15762 |
| Date | January 1983 |
| Creators | KENNEDY, PAMELA ANN |
| Source Sets | Rice University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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