A Cool Old Study of Methodist Ministers

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One of the things that organizational researchers like to argue about most is how much leadership matters, how strongly it effects performance and organizational survival in particular. I've been going through some of the literature lately. One pattern that is clear is that leaders have the biggest impact on teams and in small organizations, which makes sense because wielding personal influence over people you come into personal contact with constantly is a lot easier than doing so over 100,000 people you don't know and will never meet.

This reminded me of one of the coolest old studies on leadership influence, a 1984 study of Methodist ministers by Jonathon Smith and his colleagues. Because ministers get rotated regularly from one church to another, it provided a great setting to see the effects of leaders arriving and leaving on performance. They tracked 50 United Methodist ministers who had led 132 different churches over a 20-year period. They found that when ministers with track records of boosting membership, donations, and even property values in past jobs were transferred to a new congregation, they repeated these success in their new congregations.

A study by Jeff Pfeffer and AIison Davis Blake on NBA basketball coaches showed similar effects, where those coaches with better past win-loss records are more likely to turnaround a new team (regardless of the team's past performance). These studies suggest that people who make the extreme argument that leadership doesn't matter at all are misguided, at least when it comes to small groups and organizations. At the same time, if you look closely as these studies, the impact of leadership changes are not huge, rarely accounting for a 10% change in performance, with most effects being below 5%.

So leadership is a case where I find people who make the most extreme arguments aren't making an evidence-based case.

P.S. One thing that is also becoming clear from the current scandals is that one or two sleazy leaders can bring down a whole company –as Bernie Madoff and today's scandal at Satyam in India shows. Such cases, to me, also show that — at least at the extremes — people who argue leaders of big companies don't matter at all are deluding themselves.

P.P.S. Thanks to the Financial Times Management Blog for making this post the pick of the week.

The references to the studies are:

Smith, Jonathon, E., Kenneth P. Carson, & Ralph A. Alexander (1984) Leadership: It can make a
difference Academy of Management Journal. 27:765-776

Pfeffer, Jeffrey & Alison Davis Blake (1986) Administrative succession and organizational performance:
How administrative experience mediates the succession effect. Academy of Management Journal. 29:72-
83.

Comments

4 responses to “A Cool Old Study of Methodist Ministers”

January 8, 2009

Kevin Rutkowski

One more recent fraudulent leader is Tom Petters of Minnesota. His fraud “only” involved around $3.5 billion, so he didn’t get as much national attention. Still, his actions had a tremendous negative effect on a lot of people, and he was incredibly well respected prior to September 24th. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Petters

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January 8, 2009

Wally

Thanks for reminding me of both those studied, Bob. As a preacher’s kid, I especially like the Methodist study.
I did some related research years ago as part of my study of top performing supervisors. We looked at public service agencies that doled out work assignments based on “seniority shift draw.” The senior people got first pick of assignments. We found that many of them would pick a less desirable assignment to work with an excellent supervisor. One result was that the best supervisors tended to get the best workers when the semi-annual shift assignments happened and this made them even more likely to continue above-average performance.

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January 8, 2009

Amy Wilson

Bob – my father-in-law is a Methodist minister and I have always been so impressed by the career progression opportunities of the church as well as my father-in-laws ability to build new networks every where he goes and maintain the prior network.
These studies reminded me of the study on Doctors in which performance suffered significantly if the doctor went to another hospital. My colleague suggested that this is an exception that proves the rule – in this case the doctors are not providing leadership, but instead are star players being traded.

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January 9, 2009

Andrew Meyer

I can’t speak for the Methodist preachers, but one thing that amazes me about successful coaches is that they have two things. One, they have a talent for coaching and getting the most out of a particular type of person. Two, they have an awareness of how they operate and select organizations and structures where they have a chance of being successful.
I haven’t done studies in the area so it’s just an opinion, but knowing your own talents and the environment you can succeed in has a lot to do with success. Equally, if one is successful in a particular environment and you notice that that environment is changing, either change yourself or have the courage to find the right environment.

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