Ohio State Leadership Studies

Key Takeaways

hey there welcome back i'm alex lyon and today we are looking at the ohio state leadership studies this is a set of studies from decades ago at ohio state and they found some interesting results about leadership that build on some other leadership theories so let's get into the details so the researchers at ohio state used a questionnaire called the lbdq to evaluate military commanders and found that they had two primary dimensions of leadership and these will look familiar if you've been looking at the other leadership studies that we've been talking about the first is consideration and the next is initiating structure so in a related video we talked about interpersonal or people-oriented skills and task-related skills so i would say that consideration lines up pretty well with interpersonal related skills and initiating structure is another way to talk about tasks so let's dig down into consideration they saw that these military commanders had some of them had really high consideration scores they had interpersonal communication that was designed to express affection and liking for their followers so they showed the people around them that they cared about them they showed consideration for followers feelings opinions and ideas and they maintained an amiable or pleasant work environment some leaders however were also inconsiderate and these leaders would criticize followers in front of others which is the most embarrassing kind of criticism they would sometimes make threats and they would refuse to accept suggestions or explanations so one of the variables is consideration and you could be high or you could be low on this variable the next main component is initiating structure and this is the second one and this again lines up with task oriented or production oriented activities like we've seen in some other studies this is where you're initiating or sparking action you're assigning tasks you're letting followers know what is expected of them on those tasks you're setting and holding others to clear-cut performance standards and you could be high or low at this maybe you're not doing any of these things and you're not initiating structure so one of the contributions of this ohio state leadership study is they took the next step from the michigan studies and they said this is a two-dimensional model they crossed these two dimensions in the center they made the beginnings of a model and they said that you could be either high or low in consideration or higher low in initiating structure so i asked in a past video about which way do you lean on this but now i would ask which box would you put yourself in so if you're high or low depending upon which of these areas where would you be would you be in that that lower left box that's low in structure and low in consideration or one of the other boxes perhaps you're both high in your initiating structure in high and your consideration scores i'm wondering what box and you can just describe it in the comments section below so question of the day which one are you are you in the bottom left top left top right which is like the ideal one or bottom right i look forward to hearing those comments in that section below and i will see you soon