The Qualities of Leadership: Direction, Communication, and Obfuscation

What is leadership? What is good leadership? What is successful leadership? Answers emerge from our study of a formal model in which followers face a coordination problem: they wish to choose the best action while conforming as closely as possible to the actions of others. Although they would like to do the right thing and do it together, followers are unsure about the relative merits of their options. They learn about their environment and the likely moves of others by listening to leaders. These leaders bridge differences of opinion and become coordinating focal points. A leader’s influence increases with her judgement (her sense of direction) and her ability to convey ideas (her clarity of communication). A leader with perfect clarity enjoys greater influence than one with a perfect sense of direction. When followers choose how much attention to pay to leaders they listen only to the most coherent communicators. However, power-hungry leaders who need an audience sometimes obfuscate their messages, but less so when their followers place more emphasis on conformity than on doing the right thing. Political scientists and commentators agree that leadership is central to the performance of organizations and yet fundamental questions remain open. What does it mean to lead? What is good leadership? When is a leader successful? Which qualities contribute to good and successful leadership, and how do these qualities arise? To answer these questions we develop a formal theoretical model in which the actions of a mass of followers are shaped by the speeches made by leaders. Specifically, the followers are engaged in a coordination game: they each wish to do the right thing, and do it together, but lack full information about their environment. They form their opinions by 1We warmly thank Thomas Plümper, Ken Shepsle, Lee Sigelman, Chris Wallace, three anonymous referees, and seminar participants at Edinburgh, Essex, Oxford, Pisa, and Warwick, for helpful comments. We also thank Michael Chwe and the editorial team of the APSR for helping to shape the final version. 2Of course, many authors have contributed towards theories of leadership. In the context of party leaders, we have learned how leaders manipulate the agenda (Riker, 1996), serve as agents of their parties (Fiorina and Shepsle, 1989), and choose policies that enhance their survival (Bueno de Mesquita, Smith, Siverson, and Morrow, 2003). Economists have suggested that a leader may use “leading by example” to send a costly signal to others and hence encourage their efforts (Hermalin, 1998). Of course, the work mentioned here is only a small sample; there is a large literature on leadership spanning several fields and disciplines. However, at an abstract level we believe that the questions posed here have not been fully answered.