Dutiful Leaders

“Dutiful leadership” seems almost oxymoronic: can a leader be a leader and dutiful at the same time? “Dutiful followership” might seem a more appropriate phrase! In lots of organizations however, most leaders are also followers and are therefore expected to be dutiful. Unfortunately, being dutiful might actually hinder leadership and possibly derail the leader, curtailing the effective achievement of their goals. Researching the above led me to the definitive work on derailment by Hogan and Hogan: Hogan Development Survey Manual, 2009, 2nd ed. Hogan Assessment Systems. Therein they define “dutiful” as one of eleven possible leadership derailers.

Here’s a summary of “dutiful” as a derailer followed by further implications (“et alors”):

Dutiful Leaders

According to Hogan dutiful leaders can be characterized as follows:

How they see themselves:

• Concerned about being accepted, being liked and getting along, especially with authority figures.
• Quick to spot signs of disapproval but also for opportunities for ingratiation.
• To amend an offense, they will redouble their efforts to be model citizens.

How others see them:

• Good natured, polite, cordial and indecisive.
• Reluctant to challenge authority since they will do anything their boss asks.
• Reluctant to support staff and hence have reduced legitimacy as leaders.

At their best they:

• Are charming and eager to please.
• Are seldom critical or threatening.
• Rarely have enemies and tend to rise in organisations.

At their worst they:

• Have problems taking initiative or making a stand.
• Find it difficult to take a decision.
• Have trouble maintaining a team.

Et alors?

According to Hogan, being dutiful is first and foremost a potential derailer and only afterwards might it have some value mostly in the context of followership; however dutiful leadership appears to be pervasive in large organisations. As Hogan’s research has shown, there are many “leaders” who have risen in the organization because they are dutiful. What are the symptoms for an organization if it is full of leaders who are overly dutiful? Potentially derailment on a collective rather than individual scale? The organization will certainly be less effective because the teams will not be fully engaged with the leaders; initiatives and business will be lost not least due to slowness in decision making; and the actions of the senior leaders will go unchallenged leaving little room for “bottom-up” innovations.

Might some national cultures be more prone to dutiful leadership than others? There certainly appears to be a link between Hogan’s concept of “dutiful” and Hofstede’s concept of “power-distance”. For cultures with a high sense of power-distance, the unequal distribution of power is accepted. That acceptance is directly translatable into the “dutiful” behavior of those who do not have power even if some of those “dutiful” people could be leaders and/or aspire to power themselves. In low power-distance cultures “dutiful” behavior is less likely to be observed. This might go some way to explaining why low-power distant cultures such as the USA have given rise to some very dynamic corporations in comparison to their counterparts in Europe…