Performance management leadership: 'Blocking and tackling' of the CEO playing field

The study of "transformational leadership" has dominated leadership literature since the first wave of celebrity CEOs emerged into the limelight in the early 1990s. But Angelo Kinicki, a professor of management at the W. P. Carey School of Business, says it's time for researchers to look beyond charisma and transformational leadership as a focal point of study. Kinicki and two colleagues have set forth their analysis of a skill set called Performance Management Leadership. PML "encompasses broad and proactive leader behaviors that serve to motivate, direct, support, modify, assist, monitor and reinforce employees in pursuit of goal accomplishment." In football terms, Kinicki says, PML is the "blocking and tackling" of business leadership — the hard work of getting the most out of your workers, every day.

The public is fascinated by charismatic CEOs. So, too, are business scholars. Academics in the field of leadership have spent the better part of the last decade trying to understand how celebrity CEOs such as General Electric's Jack Welch or Southwest's Herb Kelleher used business acumen — and their powerful personalities — to make believers out of their employees and get the most out of their companies. The study of so-called "transformational leadership," then, has dominated leadership literature since the early 1990s.

But Angelo Kinicki, a professor of management at the W. P. Carey School of Business, says it's time for researchers to look beyond mere charisma, and beyond transformational leadership. Effective leadership, says Kinicki, requires more than charisma. It also requires that managers execute. They must work, day in and day out, to get the most out of their employees. Execution is a fundamental component of effective leadership, and execution requires leadership behavior that goes beyond transformational leadership.

"People are really fascinated by charisma and a leader's ability to 'transform' people, but less interested in the day-to-day leadership that leads to results," Kinicki says. "I'm not so concerned about these charismatic leaders, or how they transform people. I want to understand the day-to-day leadership that leads to results."

What makes a successful manager?

In a new paper, Kinicki and two colleagues — W. P. Carey colleague Kathryn Jacobson and Gregory Prussia of Seattle University — deliver compelling evidence that the traditional model for studying business leadership does not provide a full understanding of what separates successful managers from their failed colleagues. The team's work proves that a previously overlooked genre of leadership behaviors — a six-pronged skill set called Performance Management Leadership (PML) — is just as crucial to the success of an organization as transformational leadership.

The research, based on a survey of more than 2,300 managers at more than 75 companies, not only hints at a new way of studying corporate leadership, but also strongly suggests managers who are successful at PML — comprised of leadership behaviors pertaining to support and coaching, communication, providing consequences, feedback, process of goal setting, and establishing and establishing/monitoring performance expectations — are better leaders than those who aren't.

Kinicki's work is significant because it marks the first attempt to merge scholarship on leadership from previously separate academic worlds — leadership studies and human resources studies. Human resources scholars have for years emphasized the importance of performance management — while leadership scholars have worked principally within the so-called "full-range theory."

This theory is based on the idea that leadership varies along a continuum from laissez-faire leadership (i.e., a failure to take responsibility for leading) to transactional leadership to transformational leadership. (Transactional leadership is a management style that focuses principally on how a leader rewards or punishes employees; transformational leadership is the ability to win confidence and influence others.)

The majority of research in the last decade has focused on the effects of either transactional or transformational leadership, and has ignored any type of leadership that exists between these end-points of a leadership continuum.

"Academics, just like organizations, can sometimes create silos," Kinicki explains. "You have people who do research on leadership and they say, 'Here it is: Leadership is either transactional or transformational.' That's the dominant perspective today. Then you have people in HR, an entire different group of scholars, saying, 'We have to focus on performance management.' It's just a different process. And these two groups don't talk to each other."

Leadership literature lacking

It was while he was working as a consultant and helping companies develop leadership programs in the early 1990s that Kinicki began to suspect there was more to leadership than the leadership literature suggested. After gathering ideas from focus groups in the field, he eventually concluded performance management leadership—which HR scholars had long known was crucial to organizational success—was the missing piece in the leadership puzzle.

"The leadership literature is just so overwhelming that leadership researchers pretty much focus on their perspective of leadership," Kinicki said. "They don't read performance management publications — that's an HR topic. In HR, researchers focus on more applied topics such as compensation, and the nuts and bolts of performance appraisal. But they don't rely on leadership research to understand these applied issues. Nobody has ever said, 'Hey, let's integrate leadership and performance management together.' And the idea for merging them really came from these focus groups."

PML, Kinicki believed, would finally bridge the "canyon" between transactional and transformational leadership.

Despite the heavy emphasis on transactional and transformational leadership in years past, Kinicki and his colleagues note in their paper that that there have been "several unanswered questions" about the so-called "full-range theory." Those questions came out, they believe, because the theory was not yet complete: Academics could not fully understand leadership, the team concluded, until full-range theory was expanded to "include additional leadership styles and behaviors."

In other words, the model had to be expanded to include PML. "We assert that performance management leadership answers these calls by providing another type of leadership that conceptually fits between the categories of transformational and transactional leadership depicted within the full-range theory," they wrote.

So what, exactly, is PML? According to Kinicki and his colleagues, PML "encompasses broad and proactive leader behaviors that serve to motivate, direct, support, modify, assist, monitor and reinforce employees in pursuit of goal accomplishment." In football terms, Kinicki says, PML is the "blocking and tackling" of business leadership — the hard work of getting the most out of your workers, every day.

"When I talk about performance management leadership, I describe it as the blocking and tackling of leadership," he says. "It's all about leadership that helps organizations to execute. It's the basic things that help leaders to be successful."

The six dimensions of PML, and their definitions, are:

• Support and coaching: The extent to which a leader instructs, directs and promotes employee effectiveness. This dimension includes such factors as providing employees with adequate resources, serving as a role model and providing guidance.
• Communication: An "essential core competency for a successful leader," this dimension includes approachability and the ability to offer positive feedback.
• Providing consequences: The extent to which a leader acknowledges employee performance through recognition and rewards.
• Feedback: A measure of the quantity, quality and timeliness of performance information a leader passes onto his employees.
• Process of goal setting: A measure of how well a leader establishes developmental and performance goals linked to the organization's goals.
• Establishing/monitoring performance expectations: The extent to which a manager keeps track of how well an employee is meeting the aforementioned goals.

"PML is about executing on a daily basis — where the rubber meets the road," Kinicki says. "That's what I'm talking about." But for PML to be accepted as a legitimate new measure of leadership success, Kinicki and his team first had to prove it was, as they suggested, an entirely different leadership competency or skill than had previously existed. To do so, they had to find a way to measure it.

Survey measures leadership behaviors

What they came up with is their own measure of PML acumen, a test they call the Performance Management Leadership Survey, or PMLS. The test was created, the team writes, as a "reliable, valid and moderate-length measure of the extent to which a manager, supervisor or team leader engages in performance management leadership behaviors." The new test was also, they believed, entirely different than the respected Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire Form 5X, or MLQ5X.

That test has long been considered the standard for measuring leadership success, but Kinicki and his team say the PMLS measures different skills in different ways—and that both tests are important. "PMLS is in fact unique and different than MLQ5X," Kinicki said. "It's independent and separate from that."

Maybe more importantly, the team's work, and the PMLS results, showed that what Kinicki had suspected more than a decade ago was true. The team put the PMLS to use on more than 2,000 managers from more than 75 U.S. companies and found conclusive evidence that PML is, indeed, crucial to successful leadership.

"Leaders who [thrive at PML] are viewed as more effective than leaders who do not," Kinicki says of the study results. "The takeaway lesson here is that leaders should engage in these six dimensions of PML, because results show that leaders who use performance management leadership behaviors have more satisfied employees and employees who are more willing to put in extra effort at work. So does PML work? Yes, it does."

An important point about this work, Kinicki says, is that PML does not render the existing scholarship on transformational leadership irrelevant. Rather, he said the research simply shows that PML is another factor in successful business leadership — a new realm of understanding to compliment the existing ones. "We already know that transactional and transformational leadership are important," he says. "What we've hypothesized is that this new leadership matters, and when leaders engage in it, it should augment their effectiveness."

He continued, "Effective execution requires leaders to use PML. If managers want to get things done, they have to start with a goal. Then they want to make sure their staffs have the skills and abilities to achieve those goals. Good managers know that they have to do it, and I think they are doing it. PML is going on, and it's been going on. What we've done is label it."