خلاصة:
This research aims at discovering the traits and abilities which characterize ideal leaders in the minds of employees in an Iranian context. After employing the strategy of phenomenology to reach the components of ideal leadership, 15 tenured middle managers and employees possessing decent management knowledge in the context were interviewed and after theme analysis, global, basic, and organizing themes were extracted. The results showed that the whole themes could be categorized into two groups of prototypes and anti-prototype. Five of the themes are the prototypes labeled as charismatic, humane oriented, employee’s servant, emotionally mature, and decisive and three of them are the anti-prototype labeled as selfish, deceptive, and narrow-minded. Although some of the components of Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) are generalizable, the context can produce some distinct features of ILTs. This research tried to discover implicit leadership theories in an Iranian context. According to the available themes in the literature of ILTs, employee’s servant, emotionally mature and decisive are the three novel prototypes and deceptive and narrow-minded are the new anti-prototypeanti-prototype. Moreover, this is the first study using interview to discover ILTs with the inclusion of data retrieved from participants’ semantic memory.
ملخص الجهاز:
Implicit Leadership Theories: A Qualitative Study in an Iranian Organization Mohammad Sadegh Sharifirad, Saeed Mortazavi, Fariborz Rahimnia, Mohammad Mahdi Farahi Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran (Received: April 24, 2016; Revised: December 13, 2016; Accepted: December 18, 2016) Abstract This research aims at discovering the traits and abilities which characterize ideal leaders in the minds of employees in an Iranian context.
By the 1970s, researchers turned their attention to leader-member relationship and then in the 1980s, the new shift caused the understanding of leadership through the perspectives of followers (Felfe & Peterson, 2007).
These cognitive frameworks, or schemas, which help people to recognize leaders, are called implicit leadership theories (ILTs) (Lord & Maher, 1991).
Social-cultural environment has a profound impact on ILTs (Rydberg, 2016); thus, the content of implicit Iranian leadership is likely to be different from that of Western theories; therefore, the objective of the present study is to discover how Iranian people in National Iranian Oil Products Distribution Company (NIOPDC) in Kerman think about a leader, and to identify the dimension of the Iranian implicit concept of leadership.
Talking about a culture specific measure, Ling, Chia and Fang (2000) developed Chinese Implicit Leadership Theories scale with four first-order factors (goal effectiveness, personal mortality, versatility, and interpersonal competency).
Researchers have already pointed out that altruistic love, friendship, forgiveness, care, and compassion are among the important cores and values in Iran in addition to the fact that interactions of Iranian people have obviously formed low assertiveness and high levels of courtesy (Javidan & Dastmalchian, 2003).