Romanticising the Unromantic

During the time of a merge, there needs to be a leader that is able to calm the group and promise them that everything will be okay – whether or not that is true is another story. Some people may lose their jobs but they cannot tell them such because work will not be done efficiently due to such a looming fear, yet they cannot fairly promise them that their job is completely safe because that would be outright lying. Emrich’s “Context Effects in Leadership Perception” relates directly to this leadership position. His experiment of having one tranquil group against a troubled one proved that the same leader was seen to be more efficient and desirable based on the troubled group merely based on their unconscious perceptions and how those came to light when faced with different contexts.

A leader emerged within the marine group and was able to not promise anything but calm and revert those he led back to their normal state without consistently living and working in an environment thinking that the merge was the end of the world. Emrich’s study went further and discussed how thinking that a new leader is part of the solution however that might not always be the case. This was additionally found in this office – for a current leader was running against a new leader and the new leader ended up becoming victorious. Such is all stemmed and rooted from the fact that this merge took the office and the business away from the status quo they were so used to – it changed leader and follower relations during an attempt to conjoin two different types of leadership styles. This is why the romanticized qualities of the new leader ended up becoming more evident in the troubled group than in the tranquil group – for if this leader was not coming to power during a merge then there is a large chance he would not be becoming a leader.

For this relates back to something I found really intriguing during Professor Goethals class – and that was the fact that leadership resides in the eyes of the followers. For a leader to lead or to be viewed to be a leader he or she must have followers. And not only that but how much luck and time come into play and are largely unrecognized when it comes to situations of power – it is always assumed that the person earned their position when in reality being in the right place at the right time proves to hold so much power. This is extremely evident especially in a situation like a merge.