Kaiser, R.B. & Kaplan, R.E. (2000, April). Getting at Leadership Versatility: Theory and Measurement of the Forceful and Enabling Polarity. Poster session presented at the 15th Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, New Orleans, LA.

Contemporary thinking about executive leadership suggests that versatility is key to effectiveness. This paper describes the development of an innovative measure and an empirical evaluation of a theory of versatility in terms of forceful and enabling leadership styles. Persuasive evidence for the construct validity of the theory and measure is presented. Forceful and enabling leadership were inversely related and few executives showed clear evidence of versatility in their use of forceful and enabling leadership. Further, versatility on the forceful and enabling polarity predicted between 16 to 35 % of the variance in coworker ratings of overall effectiveness.

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