Choosing leaders: a group interactional approach.

Executive Summary

This article advances a theoretical framework for understanding how groups evaluate leaders using insights from small group research. Leadership selection is presented as an "interactional process," involving the variables of personality, group, and situation. All groups expect their leaders to perform two basic leadership functions depending on the situation -- what we describe as "instrumental" and "affective" leadership roles. The "instrumental" and "affective" dimensions of presidential leadership are delineated to provide a more complete picture of the leadership roles parties and voters desire as they nominate and elect presidents. While the focus is on the selection of American presidents, the framework advanced is readily applicable to the selection of leaders in groups of all sizes.

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The study of presidential selection in America is alive and well. Using a variety of different approaches, students of the presidency have focused on ambition and rational choice theories, institutional rules of the nominating game, campaign strategies, voter choice, partisan voting, issue voting, retrospective voting, candidate evaluation, and the relationship between campaigns and governance (Aldrich 1993). Although each approach focuses on some aspect of the leadership selection process, political science lacks an overarching framework that places these contributions in their proper perspective and indicates their relative importance to an understanding of the presidential selection process.

This article advances a theoretical framework to provide such a perspective. The insights put forward are taken from political science, sociology, social psychology, and in particular from small group leadership theory. The focus will not be on the methodological problems of applying insights from small group studies to larger groups. Sidney Verba, in his landmark study Small Groups and Political Behavior (1961), has already addressed that threshold issue. We instead concentrate on two theoretical contributions from small group leadership theory directly relevant to our understanding of how we choose leaders. First, this work recognizes that leadership selection is an "interactional process" involving the variables personality, the group, and the situation. Second, this work points out the two basic leadership functions every group expects its leader to perform -- the "instrumental" and "affective" leadership functions. Our work combines these important insights from research on small groups into a broader theoretical framework for analyzing the selection of the president in particular and group leaders in general.