function in social and organizational worlds which tend to be largely impenetrable and which severely
limit the collective (leadership) effort. A potential area of interest for improving the negative
connotation of hierarchy, is acknowledging the distinctive added value of each organizational level.
This requires first and foremost insight into the manifestation of leadership behavior at different
organizational levels.
The sparse literature that exists on this topic, hints at qualitative differences in effective leadership
between higher and lower organizational levels (Day & Lord, 1988; Katz & Kahn, 1978). Within an
organizational hierarchy, the natural tendency is that people move upwards the corporate ladder. In
essence, these are the same people, fulfilling different functions sequentially (Charan et al., 2001;
Hurd, 2009). There are different views regarding how change between organizational levels manifests
itself. There are two perspectives in the literature that appear to be in direct conflict ± the
discontinuous versus continuous required leadership skill transition (De Meuse et al., 2011). The
discontinuity perspective posits that the changing skill requirement across organizational levels is
discontinuous. Leadership behavior that is positively related to effectiveness at a lower level may
become negatively related to effectiveness at higher levels. Consequently, managers need to stop
performing those behaviors that are not contributing to effectiveness as they get promoted. The
continuity perspective suggests that all levels of effective managers possess about the same behavioral
repertoire. Promotion requires managers to perform more of those behaviors that become more
important for higher levels and gain skill efficiency on those behaviors. Yet, these individuals do not
have to unlearn past behaviors.
This chapter explores both the discontinuity and continuity perspective. Section 3.3 reviews the
evidence for the discontinuity perspective, followed by section 3.4 which elaborates the continuity
perspective. Before the different perspectives are presented, the way differences across levels have
been traditionally conceptualized in the leadership literature, is described (section 3.2).
3.2 LEADERSHIP DIFFERENCES ACROSS ORGANIZATIONAL LEVELS
3.2.1 THREE LEVELS
Much of the earlier work on organizational level culminated in the widely cited systems framework of
Katz and Kahn (1978). They presented three different types of leadership based on the different
organizational needs at three distinct organizational levels, i.e. ³origination of structure ́ WRS-level
PDQDJHPHQW ³interpolation of structure ́ PLGGOHPDQDJHPHQW DQG³administration of structure ́
(lower management).