Organizational Leadership: Fire Services in the United States

This volume presents an alternative perspective on the problem of leadership in organizations. Dr. Charles H. Kime argues that while individuals ultimately take actions we call leadership, structural and non-structural characteristics of the organization influence the ability and inclination of organization members to engage in these actions. Further more, evidence is presented suggesting that these organizational features become assimilated into the normative structure of the organization over time and formal and informal organizational norms shape the ways in which organization members envision their roles, functions and relationships to the organization. Once institutionalized, organizational leadership may be understood as the capacity of the organization to respond to endogenous and exogenous stimuli, which present themselves as challenges, opportunities, and threats to the organization. Drawing upon general systems and complexity and chaos theory, Kime presents organizational leadership as a normative feature of organizations, that can help or hinder their negotiation of a complex, nonlinear environment. Kime tests his formulation on a sample of fire services organizations in the United States. In addition to confirming the viability of organizational leadership as a concept, he explores the empirical relationship of organizational leadership with organizational size, texture, age, labor management process and other variables.