The Participation-Direction Debate in Leadership: Insights from Ramayana
KEY WORDS
Participative Leadership, Informational justice, Ramayana
Introduction Leadership theorists tend to prefer participation over direction as an attribute of effective leadership. Participation and direction refer to respectively high or low follower involvement in decision making (Northouse, 2010; Yukl, 1999). Some of the theories restrict this general trend with contingencies. For example, the path-goal theory suggests that followers with low technical know-how may prefer directive leaders, whereas, those with high technical know-how may prefer participative leaders (House, 1996). Nevertheless, the underlying belief is that leaders preferring participation or direction are different in kind. Yukl (1999) challenged this belief with the assertion that participation and direction are attributes of leader choices rather than leaders themselves. Leaders may not be effective if they opt for participation or direction as a matter of habit rather than a need-based choice.
There is a lack of strong and consistent empirical evidence for the effectiveness of participative leadership (Yukl, 1999, 2009). This may mean that participation weakly or moderately influences leader effectiveness; however, this may also mean that conceptualizing it as a leader attribute is itself a mistake. The problem may not be resolved by simply conceptualizing participation and direction in terms of leader choices. It may still not be possible to empirically show that these choices significantly influence leader effectiveness because that may be a function of their effective use rather than the choices as such. Ramayana, the celebrated epic of India, portrays many decision situations that can be analyzed to gain some insights into this matter; however, for the purpose of this article, I will focus on one particular episode portrayed in the 17th and 18th chapters of the Book 6 (Yuddha Kanda) of the Valmiki Ramayana (VR).