PERSPECTIVES ON EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP BEHAVIOUR - Case Study Example

Perspectives on Effective Leadership Behaviour BY YOU YOUR SCHOOL INFO HERE HERE Perspectives on Effective Leadership Behaviour The dimensionsof leadership that define personal leader integrity, trust, knowledge or any other psychological personality trait are difficult to define. The impact on workers related to the style of leadership is unique for each individual employee at the organization, therefore measuring whether employee attitudes are improved or changed because of leadership interaction requires a streamlined process to measure these variables.

Though a questionnaire is an appropriate research tool to measure leadership behaviour and its impact on the organization, it does have limitations. These limitations include response bias, which involves stereotypes or favoritism shown toward the leader by the respondents that can distort results. There may also be social norms that exist within the organizational culture that have established a leader is effective even though such effective behaviours have not been observed personally by respondents.

Therefore, the respondents may provide information within the questionnaire format that they believe will satisfy these social norms about the leader. There may even be problems with reliability with the research instrument, the questionnaire, that is not developed with questions that accurately measure what is intended to be understood. Causality is defined as a cause and effect phenomenon where situation x occurs as a direct result of activities stemming from situation y. When measuring leadership, causality might be whether leadership behaviour x has a direct impact on employee motivation y.

Consider the following: An organizational leader is using a questionnaire format to determine whether motivation is being negatively affected by improper leadership. Correlations are being sought in relation to the respondent information returned from the research tools. When these correlations have been identified, it can give information about whether or not the leader actually has a direct influence on employee attitude or behaviour. “Causality is critical: it tells us what is possible, what can be changed and what is difficult, if not impossible, to change” (mailer.fsu.edu, 2002, p.2). However, this has difficulties as there might be a third variable that is also involved that also affects employee or organization-wide attitude or motivation that was not measured in the questionnaire design.

“Causal knowledge deals with dependencies between events or with how effects depend on causal conditions” (psychologie.uni-freiburg.de, 2009, p.1). There may be more than just one correlating event or activity occurring that skews the data provided on the questionnaire, thus causality measurements might have several variables impacting the situation. Because of this, researchers seeking to identify leadership behaviour might have to be more concerned with reliability on the research instrument or consider more than one criterion for measurement.

Especially in dynamic or multi-national organizations with high levels of divisional inter-dependency, it is likely that more than just one causal event is impacting employee productivity, attitude or motivation. This is why these questionnaires must have high validity where they can be used again and again in similar respondent samples and still achieve the same results that the researcher is attempting to measure. References Mailer.fsu.edu. (2002), “Reliability, Validity, Causality and Experiments I”, Retrieved June 19, 2011 from http://mailer.fsu.edu/~slosh/MethodsGuide3.

html Psychologie.uni-freiburg.de. (2009), “Causality”, Retrieved June 19, 2011 from http://www.psychologie.uni-freiburg.de/signatures/beller/research/sbCausality.html Bibliography Guo, Z. & Wagner, Z. (2008), “Causality vs. Correlation: Rethinking Research Design in the Case of Pedestrian Environments and Walking”, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management. Retrieved June 19, 2011 from http://wagner.nyu.edu/rudincenter/publications/Working_Paper_Guo_2010.pdf van der Zouwen, J., Smit, J. & Draisma, S. (2006), “Bidirectional causality in methods research of interviews with standardized questionnaires: Anticipation and repair as sources of interviewer effects”.

Retrieved June 20, 2011 from http://www.unizar.es/sociocybernetics/congresos/DURBAN/papers/vanderzouwenetal.pdf