Measurement and Empirical Validity
5. Conger-Kanungo charismatic
leadership 0.26** 0.53** 0.57** 0.69**
Subscales
Vision and articulation (six items) 0.27** 0.47** 0.44** 0.62**
Environmental sensitivity
(seven items) 0.39** 0.54** 0.52** 0.63**
Unconventional behavior
(three items) -0.03 -0.05 0.05 0.06
Personal risk (four items) 0.16** 0.24** 0.31** 0.42**
Sensitivity to member needs
(three items) 0.15** 0.71** 0.75** 0.60**
Does not maintain status quo
(two items) -0.18** -0.08 0.02 0.14**
SOURCE: Adapted from "Charismatic Leadership in Organizations: Perceived Behavioral Attributes and Their Measurement" (p. 450), Conger and Kanungo, Journal of Organizational Behavior. © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons Limited. Reproduced with permission.
**p<0.01.
role, the Conger-Kanungo scale measuring charismatic leadership is positively related to the other leadership measures such as Bass charisma, participation, and people orientation. The Conger-Kanungo scale has its highest correlation with the Bass scale (r = 0.69) and its lowest correlation with task orientation measures (r = 0.26), suggesting convergent and discriminant validities of the scale, respectively.
The Unique Features of the Conger-Kanungo Scale
The correlations of each of the Conger-Kanungo charismatic leadership subscales with other perceived leadership behavior measures are also presented in Table .3.8. These correlations further illustrate the distinctive nature of the charismatic leadership construct in the Conger-Kanungo model and the Conger- Kanungo scale as its operational measure. For example, although the charismatic leadership role as measured by Bass scale is moderately associated with articu-
TABLE 3.9 Stepwise Regression Analysis With Conger-Kanungo Dimensions as Independent and Other Leadership Scales as Dependent Variables
Task Participative People Bass Partial Partial Partial Partial
R2 F R2 F R2 F R2
Vision and
articulation — — 0.01 10.85 — — 0.06 72.40 Environmental
sensitivity 0.15 85.18 0.06 62.53 0.03 41.46 0.40 319.33 Unconventional
behavior — — — — — — — — Personal risk _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 0.02 22.68 0.02 28.59 Sensitivity to
member needs — — 0.50 488.58 0.56 618.31 0.12 122.40 Does not maintain
status quo 0.05 28.51 0.01 16.01 — — — — SOURCE: Adapted from "Charismatic Leadership in Organizations: Perceived Behavioral Attributes and Their Measurement" (p. 450), Conger and Kanungo, Journal of Organizational Behavior. © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons Limited. Reproduced with permission.
NOTE: All F values significant below 0.001 level.
lation and vision (r = 0.62), personal risk (r = 0.42), and environmental sensi- tivity factors (r = 0.63), all other types of leadership roles are associated with these factors to a lesser extent (rs = 0.27 to 0.47 in the case of articulation and vision, rs = 0.16 to 0.31 in the case of personal risk, and rs = 0.39 to 0.54 in the case of environmental sensitivity). In the charismatic role, there is some empha- sis on changing the status quo (r = 0.14), whereas in the task role, the emphasis is on maintaining the status quo (r = -0.18).
To avoid the problems of multicollinearity in interpreting the correlations of the Conger-Kanungo subscales with the other four leadership role measures in Table 3.8, four separate stepwise regression analyses were performed—one for each leadership role measure as the dependent variable. The partial R2 and F ratios are presented in Table 3.9. Clearly, in the task-oriented role, environmental sensitivity is an important factor. Sensitivity to member needs explains a large amount of variance in the participative and people-oriented roles. In the Bass scale of charismatic leadership, sensitivity to the environment and member needs explain a significant portion of the variance. Vision and articulation and the personal risk factors are of lesser importance. The dimensions of unconventional behavior and negative orientation toward the status quo do not account for variance in the Bass scale.
TABLE 3.10 LISREL Estimates of Relations Between Conger-Kanungo Dimensions and Other Leadership Measures
Task Participative People Bass Vision and
articulation 0.087 0.155*** 0.060 0.255***
Environmental
sensitivity 0.408*** 0.252*** 0.183*** 0.322***
Unconventional
behavior -0.056 -0.047 0.029 -0.61**
Personal risk 0.088** 0.065* 0.106** 0.147***
Sensitivity to
member needs -0.076* 0.445*** 0.542*** 0.270***
Does not maintain
status quo -0.167*** -0.095*** -0.034 0.028
SOURCE: Adapted from "Charismatic Leadership in Organizations: Perceived Behavioral Attributes and Their Measurement" (p. 451), Conger and Kanungo, Journal of Organizational Behavior. © 1994 by John Wiley & Sons Limited. Reproduced with permission.
*p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < 0.001.
The LISREL estimates of the relationships between the Conger-Kanungo subscales and other leadership measures corresponding to the stepwise regres- sion analysis are presented in Table 3.10. The results from the LISREL analysis provide unbiased estimates and are consistent with the regression analysis. They support the following conclusions. First, four of the Conger-Kanungo dimen- sions (vision and articulation, environmental sensitivity, personal risk, and sensitivity to member needs) have positive relations with the Bass scale, but the other two dimensions (unconventional behavior and does not maintain status quo) constitute unique features of the Conger-Kanungo scale that make it a more comprehensive measure of charismatic leadership. This observation is consistent with what we described earlier as some of the overlap between the charismatic and transformational formulations, especially on the vision and member/
follower sensitivity dimensions. The absence of additional leader behavior dimensions in Bass's scale points to the restrictive nature of the formulation of the transformational forms. Second, sensitivity to environment seems to have positive relations with all the other leadership measures. Third, sensitivity to member needs is an important feature in the participative, people, and Bass scales. Finally, vision and articulation, unconventional behavior, personal risk, and striving to change the status quo seem to constitute the major features that distinguish charismatic leadership as measured by the Conger-Kanungo scale from the other forms of leadership measures.
Refinement of the Conger-Kanungo Scale
Although the analysis described above revealed sound psychometric properties of the measure, with adequate reliability, convergent and discriminant validity coefficients, and a stable six-factor structure, an attempt was made to refine and shorten the Conger-Kanungo scale. In this attempt, a number of concerns were addressed. The first set of concerns dealt with the issues of dimensionality, parsimony, and scale brevity. In the principal components analysis described earlier, the six factors were selected on the basis of the "eigenvalue > 1" rule.
An examination of the wording of individual items and associated factor loadings, however, suggested possible item redundancy and fewer factors.
Analysis of the factor loadings (Table 3.6) revealed several items with significant loadings on more than one factor. For example, the item **readily recognizes new environmental opportunities" was classified under Factor 2 (environmental sensi- tivity) based on a factor loading of .45; however, this item has a loading of .53 on Factor 1 (vision and articulation). In addition, both items constituting Factor 6 (does not maintain status quo) were reverse coded, raising the possibility that the emergence of this factor may be an artifact. Finally, in the interest of scale brevity, it was worthwhile to examine the 25 scale items for undue redundancy.
The 25 items in Table 3.6 were subjected to scrutiny for possible redundan- cies. Based on the wording of items and the factor loadings in the original principal components analysis, it was decided to drop the two reverse-coded items forming the factor "does not maintain status quo." This eliminated the possibility that the emergence of these two items as a separate factor was an artifact. Moreover, the import of the two items is captured to some extent by other items. For example, the significance of the reverse-coded item "tries to maintain the status quo or the normal way of doing things" is reflected to an extent in the item "uses nontraditional means to achieve organizational goals."
Three more items were dropped using this latter logic. For example, the item
"appears to be a skillful performer when presenting to a group" was dropped because this notion is largely captured by the item "exciting public speaker."
The above exercise resulted in a shortened scale of 20 items.
Based on their wording, these 20 items were then reclassified into five subscales (see Table 3.11) based largely on the behavioral subdimensions suggested by the Conger-Kanungo model described earlier. Seven items were hypothesized to constitute the first factor, strategic vision and articulation (SVA;
Stage 2 of the Conger-Kanungo model). The first five of these items were earlier classified under the original factor "vision and articulation," whereas the latter two items were earlier classified under "environmental sensitivity." This group-
Strategic Vision and Articulation (SVA)