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

Alice Eagly
Short biography
Alice Professor Eagly currently holds the James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences at the
Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University in Chicago. She completed her PhD
at the University of Michigan in 1965 and she had professorial and visiting professorial
appointments at Amherst, Harvard, Purdue, Amsterdam or Tübingen. She has served as
president of the Midwestern Psychological Association and president of the Society of
Personality and Social Psychology. Alice Eagly is a social psychologist who has published
hundreds of articles and book chapters on attitude change and attitude structure and on her
research of gender and social behavior. For her book Through the Labyrinth: The truth about
how women become leaders she received a lot of praise and prizes, among others the gold
medal of the American Psychological Foundation. Professor Eagly has received several
awards, including the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American
Psychological Association, or the Carolyn Wood Sherif Award for contributions to the
psychology of women as scholar, mentor, teacher, and leader.
Interview conducted in Frankfurt am Main, the 13 th December 2011
Rolf van Dick: Alice, thank you very much for your time and the support. You know that we
have founded this center together with colleagues from psychology, economy, sociology and
we want to promote education and we promote good research in collaboration with practice
with organizations. And you have been a professor of social psychology for 40 years or
longer, you have been at different institutions, you completed you PhD in 1965 at Michigan…
Alice Eagly: Yes…
Rolf van Dick: …and then you hold or your had professorial positions at Massachusetts, you
have been a visiting professor to Harvard, you´ve been in Germany at Tübingen University,
you´ve been visiting professor at Amsterdam. You´ve received many prices and awards, you
are fellow of many of our societies like the APA, you´ve received awards for your writings -
like “Through the Labyrinth“won the Gold Medal of the American Psychological Foundation.
You try to reach out to practice in your books, in your writings and your presentations. Today
we are interested in your view on leadership in general and maybe also on your topic gender
and leadership of cause, and your personal experiences with leadership. The first question is
maybe a little bit provocative. I´m always asking: Do we need leadership? Aren´t we
allintrinsicallymotivated? Aren´t we researchers and scholars good examples of people how
don´t want leadership and can we generalize it? Or what do we need leaders for?
Alice Eagly: Well, we do need leaders in organizations because they have such complex tasks
and so there is coordination needed at a minimum, you know. So you have complex tasks
maybe in manufacturing. You are building automobiles.Well, oh my that´s complex, isn´t it?
You have to have many different parts of your organization, you have to design, accounting
and manufacturingand you know you got factories and…So if it was leaderless it would be
lost. Our university, let´s take a university. We have all these different disciplines and you
have students and classes and…so it doesn´t just work without a structure. And then the
structure has to be designed, and then it has a daily life and the organization has to go on in a
fairly orderly way. And so we do need leaders just for coordination, but also you know for