Influence of Leadership Style

Influence of Leadership Style

Introduction

The American public schools have reached a pivotal point in its history, a juncture of conflicting forces pulling and pushing the institution in opposite directions, attacking and supporting its mission, and demanding more from yet providing less to the two-year sector of higher education. At this historical juncture, the public schools is also confronted by the challenges inherent in an increasingly diverse student population, heightened external mandates for enhanced accountability, severe funding shortages, continually metamorphosing technological developments, and growing public skepticism. Compounded by an internal leadership crisis, the above forces have converged to create the proverbial “perfect storm,” an unprecedented turning point signaling the need for unprecedented leadership. Such leadership must be both situational and transformational, altering both the leader and the led and giving new credibility to the institution itself.

To effectively transform their institutions and ensure the navigation of such turbulent times, current and future middle school leaders must first transform themselves through multi-faceted evaluation involving both self-examination of their effectiveness and assessment by those with and for whom they work. This study utilized a multi-rater approach to investigate the leadership behavior, orientation, and effectiveness of sixteen selected administrators at a North Carolina public school. Those administrators included vice-presidents, associate deans, executive directors, executive officers, and one academic dean. The purpose of the research was to compare leaders? self-perceptions of their behavior, orientation/style, and managerial and leadership effectiveness with the perceptions expressed by their supervisors, peers, and subordinates.

In such a climate, the public school sector is also struggling to address the needs of an increasingly diverse student population,respond to external mandates for enhanced accountability, develop alternative sources of funding, adapt teaching and learning to continually metamorphosing technological developments, and reassure an increasingly skeptical public of its validity as a viable institution within higher education. The above forces have created an environment resembling the proverbial “perfect storm,” an unprecedented turning point signaling the need for unprecedented leadership. Such leadership must be both situational and transformational in nature, adapting to constantly changing scenarios, altering both the leader and the led, and giving new credibility to the institution itself. However, to effectively transform their institutions and ensure a successful navigation of such turbulent times, current and future middle school leaders must first transform themselves through both self-examination of their effectiveness and assessment by those with and for whom they work.

Evolution of Leadership

It has been suggested that Gibb was one of the key 'originators' of the concept coined distributed leadership. According to Gronn (2008), Gibb initiated use of the words 'distributed leadership' in writing about the subject in a chapter on leadership in the Handbook of Social Psychology in 1954. Gibb discussed leadership as not being centered on the supremacy of one person, stating: “There is still a tendency among psychologists and sociologists to think of every group as having a leader, however unequivocal uni-personal leadership rarely, if ever, occurs”. According to Gibb, leaders and followers regularly trade roles and energetic followers often instigate leadership ...