Page 194 - Effective group discussion theory and practice by Adams, Katherine H. Brilhart, John K. Galanes, Gloria J

Leading Small Groups: Theoretical Perspectives 177

Recap: A Quick Review

eadership is a process central to small group dynamics. Although a group may not
Lhave a leader, it must have leadership to move effectively toward its goal.
1. Leadership is often defined as a process involving communication efforts to influ-
ence others toward group goals. The nature of the interpersonal influence may
stem from reward, legitimate, referent, coercion, or expert power.
2. Leader is a term used to identify a person or position. Groups can have designated
or emergent leaders, and sometimes both.
3. Leadership emergence can be described in a general three-stage model depicting
how one person can, over time, become perceived as the group’s leader. Several
kinds of behaviors, such as self-monitoring and verbal style, are related to leader-
ship emergence.
4. Informal leaders who emerge in groups that already have designated leaders usu-
ally rely on referent, reward, and expert power.
5. In virtual groups, more than one informal leader usually emerges, due to such fac-
tors as frequency of communication, care displayed toward others, and balancing
task and social needs.

Chapter 6). In addition to frequency of communication, members who encouraged
others rather than ordering them around were perceived as the leaders as were those
37
who balanced both the task and social needs of the group efforts. These results per-
tain to perceptions of leadership in virtual-only groups and do not apply to groups
that use a mixture of face-to-face and online interaction.

Traditional Approaches to Leadership

Many disciplines have studied leadership. Traditional approaches focused almost
solely on the leader or person by trying to pinpoint the traits or communicative styles
of effective leaders.

Traits Approaches
One of the earliest approaches to studying leadership is the traits approach. A trait, as
we saw in Chapter 5, is a characteristic of a person. Some traits, such as eye color or
height, are unchangeable; others, such as self-monitoring, are subject to some control. Traits Approach
The traits approach to leadership assumes that leaders are more likely to have certain The approach to
traits than other group members are. leadership that
The earliest studies of the traits approach (from before the Christian era through assumes that leaders
the 1950s) assumed that people were collections of relatively fixed traits, with one have certain traits
that distinguish them
leadership situation being much like another. Traits approach researchers believed that from followers or
leaders were born, not made, and looked for the traits that distinguished leaders from members of a group.
followers. Some studies found that leaders tended to have higher IQs and were taller,
38
more attractive, and larger than nonleaders. But as you might guess, there simply is
no trait or combination of traits that leaders have but other members don’t.

gal37018_ch07_169_196.indd 177 3/28/18 12:36 PM