In late 2007, one of us, Charn, found himself in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, preparing to fly a Kiowa Warrior helicopter over the Iraqi border. Kuwait is a stopover where U.S. soldiers finish all required training just prior to deploying into combat. The only treacherous part of Kuwait is the sand — it is deep and very fine so walking is slow and cumbersome. One morning, as he waded through the sand on the way to the airfield, he saw a sign proclaiming, “We Need Leadership, Not Likership.”
Why Likable Leaders Seem More Effective
New research offers new evidence that subordinates tend to rate leaders based on their personal liking of that leader rather than the leader’s actual behaviors. In the study, liking a leader was positively correlated with traditional leadership measures like authentic leadership, transformational leadership, ethical leadership, and leader-employee relationship quality and negatively correlated to abusive supervision. This means that if subordinates indicated they liked their leader, then they also rated them as more transformational, authentic, and ethical (and less abusive). The implications of this are leaders need to lead, but they also need to balance out a single-minded focus on outcomes by developing a rapport with and demonstrating a high regard for their people. The bottom line is that leaders who are not liked will pay a high price as it is almost certain that their teams will evaluate them negatively on other facets of performance.