Leadership-Interview-Transkript - Sozialpsychologie - Goethe ...

Rolf van Dick: So leaders need to be self-reflective and need to transport this to the team or
the organization they lead, particularly in times of success.
Frederick Morgeson: Yes, well it’s a sort of constant intervention, this idea of whatever
gives you your advantage needs to be continuously renewed. If you have success, sure you’re
on the top, and then there’s only one way to go, and that’s merely down. So, you always have
to be willing to give up the things that made you successful, to be successful in the future!
There are so many examples of leaders and organizations that haven’t done this, and they
suffered.
Rolf van Dick: In your own leadership positions, I mean you’re supervising PhD-students,
you’re leading the team of editors, you’ve done consultancy projects and I guess some of
them with a group of people. What would you consider most important, what have you done
that you’re proud of and where you would say, there I showed leadership or do show
leadership and that’s important?
Frederick Morgeson: Things that I’m most happy about are when I’m able to figure out
what motivates individual people and what their aspirations are and then act in a way and help
them to achieve whatever it is that they’re seeking to achieve. So whatever their individual
goals are. I think the other thing that gratifies me is this idea of having sort of sense of where
we wanna go, having an idea of what to pursue, a vision of things. And then to into it and
pursue it. We often valuate leaders who espouse visions but there’s also a certain value in not
only having the vision but then seeing it through. And so, both pieces are turn out to be
important. For example, with the journal, I have a distinctive idea of how to promote the
journal and how to try to move it forward and kind of leverage the strengths that exist.
Coming up with that and beginning to promote that and articulate that, is exciting.
Rolf van Dick: Do you find that relatively easy or do you think that because it’s so important,
it’s also the most challenging?
Frederick Morgeson: Well, so you have to continually have a message. You have to have a
set of points that are sort of memorable and convincing, and you have to continually remind
people of this. Saying it once isn’t enough. One of the things I’ve done with the journal is
trying to understand what is the purpose and the mission of the journal and how does that
make it somehow distinct from other journals. So the tagline I came up with is this idea of the
“study of people at work”. So, if you are researching people in organizations, we are
interested in that research as a journal. That’s in short the mission of the journal.
Rolf van Dick: Do you think for your own personal leadership style or in your general
interactions with people it helps to know the theory and the research evidence, do you think
that’s an advantage?
Frederick Morgeson: Yes, I think it’s a good advantage. If you have knowledge of the facts,
it’s really helpful. I think the one thing that we know about leadership, is that there’s no one
best way to lead. I view kind of leadership theories as sort of the set of possible things you
can do or be or create in your organization. The task of a leader in terms of developing
yourself is to try to understand who they are. Understand where ever their unique strengths lie
and how to leverage these unique strengths. In terms of leadership, a way to understand those
strengths and understand the possibilities is to actually understand something about leadership
research and theories.