Autocratic Leadership

Radical Quality draws upon research and practice from a variety of academic disciplines, including statistics, industrial engineering, and the study of leadership in organizational settings. There is a great deal of evidence that the use of autocratic leadership styles inhibit the ability of organizations to effectively embrace the approaches to assessment, control, problem solving, improvement, and innovation that constitute Radical Quality.

All of the major contributors to the quality body of knowledge recognized the need to constructively engage and support the employees in an organization in order to obtain high levels of quality of products and services. When the resurgence of interest in quality emerged in the 1980s, it was intertwined with a great deal of research and theory regarding the general area referred to as participative decision-making, employee participation, employee involvement, empowerment, and participatory action research – areas of research and practice going back to the 1920’s.

The study of autocratic and participative leadership owes much to the work of several people who laid the foundation for this field. Mary Parker Follett studied the relationships of groups of people in the workplace and examined questions related to authority. She began to advocate for creating a sense of partnership between manager and employees as a way to improve the quality of work, save, time, and reduce waste. She became an advocate for “power with” people instead of “power over” people in the work place. (1) Follett is known as a business philosopher, social scientists, and a pioneer in adult education.

The German Social Scientist, Kurt Lewin, who contributed so much to our understanding of organizational dynamics, systems theory, and force-field analysis was also intensely interested in the effects of autocratic leadership in organizations and societies.(2) Lewin observed that autocratic leadership inhibits involvement by employees, while participative leadership is an active form of leadership that fosters employee engagement.

Eduard Lindeman, on the faculty at the New York School of Social Work at Columbia University, studied how individuals acquiesce to decisions when an individual dominates a group through arbitrary authority. (3) Lindeman’s work expanded our understanding of how engaging adults in exploring and learning fosters improved performance in organizations and, like Follett, was another pioneer in adult education, which has a long history in the field study of leadership.

The National Training Laboratories formed in the 1960s as a coalition of academic researchers and consultants under the leadership of Warren Schmitt, bringing together social scientists and adult educators to advance the study of participative leadership.

Leland Bradford and Ronald Lippitt were among those engaged with the National Training Laboratories who conducted groundbreaking research regarding the problems associated with autocratic leadership. Bradford and Lippitt observed the differences between autocratic and participative leadership, and the problems that occur when people drift into a laissez-faire style of leadership. (4) Bradford and Lippitt observed that autocrats fall into two categories – hard boiled and benevolent. Hard boiled autocrats demand control, while benevolent autocrats temper their demand for control with human relations skills. (5) Robert Tennenbaum and Warren Schmit developed a leadership model that offered a continuum of decision-making styles from boss-centered (autocratic) to participative styles. (6) Conducting field studies from several academic institutions, Lester Coch, John French, Stanley Seashore, and Rensis Likert all contributed to our understanding of the dynamics of autocratic leadership in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Likert’s New Patterns of Management focused extensively on the benefits of participative decision-making in organizations. (7) Douglass McGregor, at MIT, built on Mary Parker Follett’s observations, along with other social scientists, to offer the very popular analysis of Theory X and Theory Y as operating paradigms for managers. Victor Vroom and Philip Yetton, leveraged all of this research to offer a model for how managers might decide how autocratic or participative their decision-making approach may be, based on the circumstances in which they are working.(8)

These researchers conducted In a variety of field research studies with autocratic and participative leadership styles. The evidence indicates that autocratic leadership can spark an initial, short-term increase in productivity. People will work harder, at first, when placed under tighter control. However, this control leads to higher turnover (the best people leave), and general employee resistance to the autocratic control in the forms of increased absenteeism and apathy. Over time, the workforce becomes endulled.

Endullment is the condition identified by Ira Shor as the opposite of empowerment. (9) Schor observed that when high school students have no sense of control over, or involvement in what they are forced to study, they turn off, passively resist, become apathetic, fail to complete assignments and fail to attend classes. The concept of endullment ties directly back to Eduard Lindeman’s observations regarding how groups acquiesce to autocratic leadership and have a direct bearing on efforts to control and improve quality.

The same phenomena occur when management adopts an autocratic approach to decision making and does not share information with the workforce, does not provide a balanced scorecard or performance indicators and does not engage the members of the workforce in a collaborate effort to continuously improve their performance and contribute to securing their mutual economic well-being.

In the endullment setting, employees talk about being treated as mushrooms – kept in the dark by management and fed manure. Many of the early efforts to develop team based organizations ran smack into the issues of autocratic leadership and the resulting sense of endullment, and stopped right there.

One observation about autocratic leadership that we can draw from the principle of homeostasis in systems theory is stated simply as “The employees always stay even.” The endulled work force will respond to autocratic leadership by increased absenteeism, longer breaks, failure to report problems, minor disciplinary issues and sometimes even worse behaviors. Given an opportunity, they will find other employment. They are certainly uninterested in helping the company by participating in quality improvement initiatives.

Likewise, many attempts by quality professionals to engage the workforce in assessment of the organizational conditions, enhancement of processes to improve control, the willingness to investigate deviations from expected performance, collaboration for continuous improvement efforts and efforts to promote innovation, are all fruitless until the anger and resentment regarding autocratic leadership is resolved.

  So, in the 1970s and 1980’s, quality professionals promoted approaches to quality circles which depend upon employees being empowered and respected, working in environments where they do not fear to report problems, accurately report data, or participate in critical analysis of work processes. In some cases this led to resistance among employees, rooted in the history of employee participation in their organizations where productivity improvement efforts had resulted in employees being laid off by their employers, thanks to the employees contributing ideas for achieving greater efficiencies. In some cases, unions and companies were able to establish clearly defined agreements to facilitate quality improvement efforts that respected employees and protected their jobs. (10)

The focus on engaging employees in quality improvement efforts re-energized the study of participation in the workplace and led to the publication of numerous books, articles, and journals on the topic of employee involvement, employee engagement, empowerment, participative management, and socio-technical systems redesign. Some have come to call this area the “soft” side of quality.

However, simply treating people with respect and listening to their opinions by itself will not lead to the control of quality and the engagement in improvement activities. Employees need to have the opportunity to learn about quality methods, diagnostic tools, approaches to problem-solving, and methods for creative thinking. Then, they need to have the organization’s support in applying these methods in the workplace. This means being given time to engage in team activities, encouragement to question work practices, freedom to see information, and rewards and recognition for contributing to the profitability and sustainability of the enterprise. Muzzle not the ox that treads out the corn.

It is accurate to say that autocratic leadership can and does create an organizational culture that can serve as the root cause for many forms of dysfunctional behavior that inhibit the type of participation within organizations that is necessary for critical self-assessment, understanding of how to prevent unwanted changes, participation in problem-solving, participation in process improvement, and a willingness to engage in generating and implementing innovative approaches to the workplace.

(1) Mary Parker Follett, Creative Experience. Longmans, Green and Company, 1924.

(2) Kurt Lewin. “The Practicality of Democracy” Human Nature and Enduring Peace. Houghton-Mifflin, 1945.

(3) Eduard Lindeman. The Democratic Man. Beacon Press, 1956.

(4) Leland Bradford and Ronald Lippitt. “Building A Democratic Work Group.” Leadership In Action. National Training Laboratories, 1961.

(5) Ibid.

(6) Robert Tannenbaum and Walter H. Schmidt “How to Choose A Leadership Pattern.” Harvard Business Review, 1958.

(7) Rensis Likert. New Patterns of Management. McGraw-Hill, 1961.

(8) Douglas McGregor. The Human Side of Enterprise. McGraw-Hill, 1960.

(9) Victor Vroom and Philip Yetton. Leadership and Decision-Making. University of Pittsburg Press, 1973.

(10) Ira Shor. Empowering Education. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

(11) John Robert Dew. Empowerment and Democracy in the Workplace. Quorom Books, 1997.