Personal Strategy as Driver of Leader Behaviour : An Exploratory Conceptual Framework

This paper develops a novel concept, viz., ‘personal strategy', to explain the leadership behaviour and its impact on organizations more effectively. Personal strategy is defined in the paper as a leader's personal action framework to achieve his personal goals in the leadership role through organizational actions. Using exploratory observations of certain organizations and by reviewing relevant literature, the paper builds the case for this concept. Further, it develops a conceptual model of personal strategic process. The paper also states certain propositions based on the discussions. The paper explains how a leader's personal setting contributes to his personal goals and how personal strategy is evolving with reference to the personal goals. The paper also examines the impact of organizational contextual factors, hierarchical structure and leader-follower interactions in determining the success of personal strategy. Besides, it considers how leadership style may have a role in the success. Moreover, the paper refers to certain elements of an effective execution plan of personal strategy and the personal strategy outcomes occurring at organizational, leader and other stakeholder levels. Further work on this last aspect has been suggested for future research