Keasership Style

Christine M. Shea
University of New Hampshire

The Effect of Leadership Style on Performance Improvement on a Manufacturing Task

In spite of the considerable amount of empirical work that has been conducted on leadership, there has been no research published to date that has used an experimental methodology to investigate the effect of leadership style on followers’ performance improvement on a manufacturing task over time. In view of the recent attention given to continuous improvement as a means of achieving improved competitiveness, it would be useful to explore the effect of leadership style on the improvement of follower performance over time. This article reports the results of a study that investigates the effect of leadership style on the qualitative and quantitative performance of a manufacturing task over a series of four trials. Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory is used as a framework to develop a model that might explain the psychological mechanism whereby leadership produces its effect on followers. A growing amount of empirical evidence points to the power of Bandura’s (1986) social cognitive theory in explaining behavior in organizations (Frayne and Latham 1987; Gist 1987; Gist, Schwoerer, and Rosen 1989; Latham and Frayne 1989; Wood and Bandura 1989; Bandura and Jourden 1991; Saks 1995). According to Bandura (1986, p. 12), ‘‘People are neither autonomous agents nor mechanical conveyors of animating environmental factors.’’ Instead, human behavior is best understood when viewed as a reciprocal system of causality where personal characteristics, environmental factors, and be( Journal of Business, 1999, vol. 72, no. 3) © 1999 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0021-9398/99/7203-0005$02.50
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A three-factor, repeated-measures experiment tested the effect of leadership style (charismatic, structuring, and considerate) on performance improvement on a manufacturing task over four trials. Findings from a repeated-measures

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