I have been interested in leadership as far back as I can remember. My mother was Jewish, and only some of her family escaped in time from Europe prior to WWII so I was very interested in studying "bad" leadership. I read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich while in junior high school. However, my interest really solidified when I came to SUNY Binghamton in 1981, and we began conversations around what constituted charismatic and transformational leadership. Specifically, why were some charismatics "good" and why were some "bad"? This has led to the last 25 years of work on understanding what it means to be transformational, and how to develop such leadership (or how it develops naturally). Most recently, our focus here at the Gallup Leadership Institute at the University of Nebraska has been on what constitutes genuine or authentic leadership development.

  Tell us about Bass and Avolio's Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire. How did you develop it, in what specific situations is it used, what are its implications, etc.?

The MLQ grew out of James McGregor Burns’s (1978) book on leadership, in which he distinguished transforming vs. transactional leadership. Bernie Bass got intrigued with the distinction, and started asking executives if they had ever met such transforming leaders. When he began to write his (1985) book Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations, the MLQ started to take shape, and we joined together to build the various versions and a feedback system. I would say that today, the MLQ has been used on literally every continent except maybe Antarctica! It is translated in numerous languages and has been used at all levels and in all types of for-profit, not-for-profit, government, sports, military, educational, etc., organization. The studies range from prison supervisors to CEOs and Catholic nuns!

In late ‘80s, we developed what we called a "full range" leadership model, which taps all of the concepts measured by the MLQ, including Laissez-faire and Inspiring/Idealized leadership. This model has now been validated in several comprehensive meta-analyses of the literature and it is the model upon which the MLQ is based. We have predicted every imaginable measure of performance. The real challenge now is looking at how leadership along this full range is mediated in its impact on performance and development.

  Your work appears, to the amateur eye, to be as much psychology as it is business-related. Do you feel this is so? And if so, is there more of a slant towards psychology or business, or is it a fairly equal blend of the two?

Both Bernie and I are industrial/organizational psychologists so I would say it is certainly psychologically based, but also examined in the context of organizations—business and otherwise.

  Are there other tools or techniques, besides the MLQ, that you use to study business and leadership practices, and what are they?

Yes, many! We use tools that have measured other styles of leadership such as participative and what is called "leader-member exchange." This latter measure gets at how leaders build trust with followers. We have also escalated our measures to assess shared or team leadership as well as the culture of leadership in organizations. Most recently we have been examining what we call "authentic leadership" and its development. We have measures of this construct, as well as a companion set of constructs we call PsyCap (psychological capital). Authentic leadership, in our view, is the root construct underlying all positive forms of leadership. The authentic leadership scale is comprised of transparency, balanced processing, moral/ethics, and self-awareness. PsyCap is comprised of hope, optimism, resiliency, and efficacy. All of the measures predict performance. PsyCap adds to work going on regarding intellectual capital, social capital, etc.

For more information on prior and current work I would recommend the following, which are available at any university library.

Avolio, BJ (2005). Full leadership development: Made/Born. NJ: Erlbaum

Avolio, BJ (1999). Full range leadership: Building the vital forces in organizations. CA:Sage

Bass, BM & Riggio, R (2005). Transformational leadership. NJ: Erlbaum.

Avolio, BJ & Luthans, FL (2006). The High Impact Leader: Moments Matter in Authentic Leadership Development. NY: McGraw-Hill.

  Do you still focus on leadership in your work? Are there other topics you have, or would like to, explore?

I have narrowed my focus to what constitutes authentic or genuine leadership development at all levels of organizations, and with all types of individuals. I am doing so because I find that most leadership development efforts are neither genuine nor valid, so we want to change how people do leadership development.

Bruce J. Avolio, Ph.D.
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Gallup Leadership Institute
Lincoln, NE, USA