As a new AOM member, and perhaps more importantly as a 43-year member of a variety
of traditional hierarchical organizations, I offer my congratulations to George Graen and
his colleagues as they celebrate 40 years of effort toward a better understanding of the
dynamics of leadership, behavioral motivation, and performance excellence.
I believe I have experienced LMX, as George describes it, as a protege of excellent leaders
who consistently brought out the best in me and many others. Like most of my
contemporaries, I have also lived with its evil twin, the demotivating effects on
performance caused by the behavior of poor leaders who had hierarchical power, but
lacked the ability to use their influence to create favorable conditions for synergistic
performance among followers.
Like parents, many leaders enter their roles with preparation frighteningly inadequate to
their responsibilities and the power they have over the lives of others. Despite the
proliferation of self-help literature and efforts in the academic community to promote
knowledge of leadership best practices, my observations leave me with the impression that
the take rate among people in leadership positions remains dreadfully low, for a variety of
reasons, not the least of which is a toxic lack of support for truly humanistic leadership
development in the culture of many organizations.
Leader-follower connections are temporal, and precious opportunities within those
connections to create the elusive conditions favorable for incubating high-performance
motivation have very short shelf lives. The unfortunate result is that the enormous
opportunity inherent in leadership positions is largely latent, unused and squandered by
people who don?t know how, or won?t make the effort, to take advantage of it in critical
moments.
Leaders will learn how to use those opportunities to generate performance excellence
among their followers when they study the practices of leaders who are clearly adept at
doing so, and this will continue to be a painfully slow process until top leaders are
persuaded that the enabling cultural conditions are worth the effort it will require to create
them.
Congratulations to the LMX community for their persistent vision and diligent efforts. As a
doctoral student now, I will seek out their research with great interest.
John Fruner
Second year DBA student
Baker College Center for Graduate Studies
john.f.fruner@gmail.com