A Leader among the Institutionalized

R.P. McMurphy and Nurse Ratched vie for control

of the ward in Ken Kesey’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. McMurphy and Ratched use opposing tactics to establish this control. Dr. Peter Northouse, a psychology professor at Western Michigan University, has distinguished leadership traits from managerial traits that one may use to compel a group of followers, and these two styles help to categorize the different tactics that the characters use in Kesey’s novel. McMurphy’s impassioned and personal style coincides with the leadership traits while Ratched’s orderly, rigid control resembles the manager that Northouse describes. Along with the differentiation of a leader and a manager, Northouse also contributes insights into the dynamics between leader and follower, in a concept he terms the development level. In applying the contrast between leader and manager, and the concept of the development level, to One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, an interesting discrepancy in McMurphy’s and Ratched’s perception of the ward’s development level appears, in that McMurphy allows the patients to accomplish more autonomously whereas Ratched arranges everything to be done for them. Other psychologists have theorized about the stages of groups’ working collaboratively, and the stages, especially the final stages where group members begin to perform independently, are present in the novel. Ken Kesey contrasts the impersonal managerial style of Ratched with the amiable, charismatic leadership of McMurphy to explain that McMurphy ultimately succeeds as the leader because the patients take on autonomy for themselves, which might improve the patients’ mental stability.

Dr. Peter Northouse’s investigations

into the workings of leadership among groups of people find that the greater intimacy of leaders over managers influence the overall progress of the group. Northouse got his Ph.D. from the University of Denver and has taught leadership and organizational communication for more than twenty years at Western Michigan University (Northouse 341). Northouse argues that leadership is a gradual process that relies on the leader’s influence among the group to accomplish goals (3). Managers and leaders set different goals for their groups, and they also interact with their followers differently, as seen in Figure 1.2. Managers work to accomplish tasks, but “do so with low emotional involvement”. Leaders, on the other hand, work to make the solutions emerge from his followers and “act to expand the available options to long-standing problems” (9-10). Managers then do not personally attach themselves to their organizations in pursuit of accomplishing tasks while leaders familiarize themselves with the strengths of the members of their organizations to direct it towards goal achievement and individual growth. Being familiar with the group, a leader also has a level of flexibility that allows him or her to shift styles depending on the development level of the group. The development level is the ability and desire which a group member must have to perform a task, and figure 5.1 juxtaposes the four different styles of leadership on the development level (88-90). The greater the development level,

meaning the more that members can achieve independently, the less a leader is necessary to organize the group to accomplish its tasks. Psychologists Elizabeth Breshears and Roger Volker explain how groups progress through stages in their work, Facilitative Leadership in Social Work Practice. In the final stages of group work, Performing and Adjourning, the delegating style, as explained by Northouse, is most effective because work on the part of the leader is minimal, allowing the group members to autonomously accomplish goals (Breshears & Volker 72-75). The intimacy that a leader possesses allows them to change tactics much more effectively than a manager to allow the natural progression of group work to occur, which McMurphy and Ratched exemplify in their struggle for control of the ward.

Kesey familiarized himself with

patients at the Menlo VA Medical Center when he participated in experiments there, much like McMurphy did in the novel. In an interview, Kesey noted that he thought the patients were “not so crazy or as bad as the sterile environment they were living in” (Faggen). The author finds that the Medical Center’s sterility is worse than the condition of the patients and, by extension, cannot help the patients. Kesey’s perspective teems with the same sense we have of McMurphy when he enters the ward; a leader enters and observes a management style that is stifling the progress of the group. Nurse Ratched’s managerial style is depicted in her “automatic”, “calculated”, and “precision-made” behavior (Kesey, 6). Bromden, the narrator, also observes that Ratched is inflexibile with his comment that the “slightest thing mess or out of kilter or in the way ties her into a little white knot of tight-smiled fury” (25). Her behavior and her inflexible nature resembles the manager, and McMurphy enters into the ward seeing a manager’s style limiting the progress of the patients. McMurphy observes what is not working and adjusts his style to help improve the ward, which is key to a good leader (Northouse 72). Bromden notes during the first Group Meeting that McMurphy recognizes something is off about the ward, but “he’ll just wait a while to see what the story is in this new place before he makes any kind of play” (Kesey 43). McMurphy waits to familiarize himself with the patients and how the ward functions before acting: a sign of a leader. Nurse Ratched and McMurphy go back and forth trying to get the advantage on one another, until the moment of truth arrives where the patients decide whom to follow. The vote for changing the hour of watching TV to when the World Series is playing comes along, and the patients on the ward decide to side with McMurphy, not so much for him, but “against the Big Nurse…against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years” (121). The patients want more independence, more autonomy, and they believe that McMurphy will give that to them more than Nurse Ratched. McMurphy’s giving them autonomy appears in the fishing trip. All throughout the scene at sea, McMurphy does nothing to help the group achieve any of the tasks they set for themselves (209-217). The patients must reach goals on their own. McMurphy’s giving the patients their independence, and his Delegating approach during the fishing trip, the “Performing stage” for the ward’s collaborative work, allows the Acutes to eventually check themselves out of the ward and take back control over their lives (275-276).

Kesey uses McMurphy to exemplify

a proper leader for any group, but especially for a dysfunctional group like the one found in the ward of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. As Peter Northouse and other psychologists have contributed to the scientific definition of a leader and how a leader functions, Kesey gives a model of a leader in McMurphy. Northouse says a leader seeks “adaptive and constructive change”, and McMurphy epitomizes the leader in his attempts to improve the patients’ development level and their sense of autonomy (Northouse, 8). That is a definite form of constructive change. McMurphy succeeds over Nurse Ratched as the leader of the ward because of his personal goal to help the patients recover if not their sanity, then their independence to progress towards sanity on their own.   On my Honor, I have neither given nor received unauthorized information regarding this work, I have followed and will continue to observe all regulations regarding it, and I am unaware of any violation of the Honor Code by others. -Nicholas L. Johnson Notes: MLA formatting was modified on the night of Nov. 1st, 2015 to remove commas from in text citations. Works Cited Breshears, Elizabeth M., and Roger Dean Volker. Facilitative Leadership in Social Work Practice. New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company, 2013. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 15 Oct. 2015. Faggen, Robert. “Ken Kesey, the Art of Fiction No. 136.” Paris Review Spring 1994. Paris Review. Web. 17 Oct. 2015. Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1962. Print. Northouse, Peter G. Leadership: Theory and Practice. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications Ltd., 2004. Print “The Three Top Skills Every Leader Should Have.” The Globe and Mail. n.p., n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2015.