What is leadership effectiveness? How do we measure it? How is it correlated to organization performance?One school of thought proposes measuring leadership effectiveness in terms of organizational productivity indices such as return on investment,cost savings, units produced etc (Yukl G, 1998). The critics argue that such organizational productivity measures are inappropriate owing to their contingencies on environmental factors over which the leader may have little or no control. They advocate that the leadership effectiveness should instead be measured in terms of follower outcomes, which is a function of follower's relation with leader and follower's relation to task (Conger, Kanungo and Menon, 2000). While this latter school of thought seems convincing to me, it triggers many lines of thought.
First, is there an unequivocal link between leadership effectiveness and organizational performance (or productivity or effectiveness)? Second, to what extent could the leadership effectiveness predict the success or failure of an organization? Third, how different is the leadership effectiveness phenomenon in various organizational contexts - commercial and social nature, small and large size, early and late stages of growth? Lastly, is there a correlation between organization effectiveness and leadership effectiveness beyond the tenure of the leader?
In their groundbreaking study in 1972 Stanley Lieberson and James O'Connor argued that leaders have little impact on organizational performance as they are constrained by situational factors. Later, some academicians such as AB Thomas have provided evidence that individual leaders do make a difference. Other scholars, such as Noam Wasserman, Bharat Anand, and Nitin Nohria, have attempted to answer to a seemingly more fundamental question "When does leadership matter?".
For now, there is a quite a lot of parallel threads that I need to explore. Well, in the meanwhile let us wait to see how Apple performs in post Steve Jobs era.