The Leader: A New Face For American Management, By Michael Maccoby. Simon Schuster, 1230 Avenue Of The Americas, New York, Ny 10020; 288 Pp., $12.95.

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Since the 1976 publication of The Gamesman, a study focusing on the personalities of managers of companies that create new technology, either Michael Maccoby has changed his mind about what constitutes effective leadership in business and government, or recent events have helped change it for him. There's barely a hint that socialpsychologist Maccoby is disenchanted with the coming to power of such consummate gamesmen as the conservative Republicans. But in view of his drift away from the earlier model manager -- a singularly calculating scrapper and exultant company winner -- toward the more humanistic version who leads by example, it seems a reasonable guess that Maccoby has sensed the drift of supply-side economics, and found it alarmingly lacking in empathy.

The book consists primarily of intensive analyses of the management style of six people who approach, but for the most part fall short of, Maccoby's ideal -- an impossible amalgam of Gandhi and Churchill, with a little of IBM's Thomas Watson thrown in. Because each of his profiles -- a foreman, a union leader, a plant manager, a bigbusiness executive officer, a government administrator, and a congressman -- tends to ramble and is not very informative, Maccoby's "new face" is better drawn in his preliminary essay about the need for different leadership in a world challenged by changing social demands and constricted by limits to growth. "A new model of leadership that expresses an ethic of self-development is needed," asserts the author. "It must bring out the best in the new social character while helping to adapt older social characters to a changing economy." In short, it's Ouchi's "Theory Z" (see Books, April) put on a couch and psychoanalyzed.

The chief executive whom Maccoby chooses as responsive to this challenge is Pehr Gyllenhammar of Volvo -- a man who, says the author, "demonstrates that leadership at the top can open possibilities for new leadership at lower levels of the organization." To bring this about, Gyllenhammar devised self-managed teams of from 15 to 20 workers, who put together a car at their own pace. These teams proved to be 10% to 15% more productive than Volvo's assembly lines. Technological advances are seen not as a threat to jobs, but as a means of relieving tedium and freeing workers for broader pursuits. Teams meet regularly to talk over personal as well as manufacturing problems. They decide such matters as scheduling and maintenance, and determine who is to work on what. The group, essentially, becomes its own middle management.

Though this type of worker participation has been taking place in Japan for many years, for some reason Maccoby is suddenly attracted to the Swedish version. "Volvo has developed the most creative sociotechnical policy of any large industry in the United States or Western Europe," he claims. In this rhapsody, he conveniently leaves out Japan and barely acknowledges that General Motors, among other American corporations, has successfully tried worker participation, too. And that, in many instances today, small business is light years ahead of Volvo in humanizing work.

Like most people interviewed by Maccoby, Gyllenhammar took the Rorschach ink-blot test. But do we really care about what it shows? Gyllenhammar may have been an innovator, but he can hardly be considered a revolutionary. His open-management schemes are no longer startling, or even unusual.

The Leader offers some moderately interesting profiles of some moderately interesting people. But an inspiring manifesto it is not.