A DIRECTIVE LEADERSHIP-STYLE IN GROUP DECISION-MAKING CAN BE BOTH VIRTUE AND VICE - EVIDENCE FROM ELITE AND EXPERIMENTAL GROUPS

The group dynamics Q-sort was used to investigate the effects of leade r directiveness in group decision making. Past research on leadership style has consistently implicated directive leaders as a chief cause o f defective process and poor outcomes in group decision making. Leader directiveness was decomposed into 2 components: (a) outcome directive ness (i.e., the degree to which a leader advocates a favored solution) and (b) process directiveness (i.e., the degree to which a leader reg ulates the process by which the group reaches a decision). Process dir ectiveness emerged as a potent predictor of quality of group process a nd outcomes. Outcome directiveness was associated with a much smaller and less coherent array of group outcomes. These findings suggest that current prescriptive models of decision making overemphasize the pote ntial harmful effects of outcome directiveness.