4.5 Operationalization
4.5.1 The leadership styles of deans
In order to establish the leadership behaviours (styles) of the deans, we have taken the CVF as point of departure (see Chapter 3). The CVF presents thirty two key behaviours required of organizational leaders, resulting into eight roles that leaders
might execute (Quinn, 1988; Hooijberg, 1996) to create value in their organizations (also see Fig 3.2). We based the first set of questions of the survey instrument regarding the leadership behaviours of the deans on the Competing Values Leadership Instrument of CVF (Quinn, 1988: 174).
The instrument defines the thirty two managerial leadership behaviours that organizational leaders might perform. The statements which were based on a seven point Likert-scale ranging from 1 (never) to 7 (always) were presented to the deans so that they could indicate how often they performed the behaviours. The second step was to establish the extent to which the deans performed the eight leadership roles of the CVF (see fig. 3.2). The thirty-two leadership behaviour statements presented to the deans were composed of four statements for each of the eight leadership roles of the CVF reflecting the roles and values associated with particular role type (see Table 4.1 below). This was to enable us to establish the extent to which the deans performed the eight leadership roles.
Table 4.1: The thirty-two leadership behaviour statements of the CVF
In the next question some behaviours that a dean might employ are listed. Please indicate how frequently you actually do the following (range from 1 = ‘never’ to 7 = ‘always’)
Eight managerial
leadership roles
Behaviour items
Innovator • come up with new inventive ideas regarding teaching, research and management matters in the faculty
• experiment with new concepts and procedures
• solve faculty problems in a creative and conventional way
• search for innovations and potential improvements and encourages
80 others to generate new ideas
Broker • exert upward influence in the university to influence strategic decision making
• influence decisions made at higher levels in the university
• approach and consult people at the higher levels of the university
• persuasively sell new ideas to the central management of the university
Producer • focus on results and performances of academic staff and foster a sense of faculty competitiveness to perform better than others
• see that the faculty delivers on stated goals
• insist on intense hard work and high productivity and sincerely push the academic staff to meet the faculty objectives
• emphasize the faculty’s achievements of stated purposes
Director • define areas of responsibility for academic staff
• make sure everyone in the faculty knows where the faculty is going in terms of objectives and goals
• set clear objectives for the faculty and restate and reinforce your vision of the faculty’s future
• clarify faculty policy priorities and future direction Coordinator • protect continuity in the faculty’s day-to-day operations
• minimize the disruptions in daily practices to have an untroubled faculty
• keep a close track of what goes on in the faculty (using control and
monitor systems)
• bring a sense of order to the faculty
Monitor • carefully review detailed reports and crosscheck information in detail
• carefully compare records, files and reports to detect discrepancies
• work with technical and information
• analyse written plans and schedules
Facilitator • facilitate consensus building in the faculty’s decision making
• encourage participative decision making in the faculty
• encourage academic staff members to share ideas with you and with the others
• build teamwork among the academic staff members
Mentor • listen to the personal problems of academic staff members and make an effort to help them
• show empathy and concern in dealing with academic staff members
• treat every faculty member in a sensitive and caring way
• show concern for the needs of academic staff members
The scores of the four statements corresponding to each of the leadership roles were accumulated i.e. for each of the leadership roles we created an index (Babbie, 1979:
405) to enable us attain the overall score of each dean for each role. The roles that attained higher scores are the ones that the deans perceive themselves to be performing most frequently and would thus be the way they perceive their leadership of the faculties. Indexes have been considered as efficient data-reduction
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devices as they enable several indicators to be summarised in a single numerical score, while sometimes very nearly maintaining the specific details of all the individual indicators. Indexes are constructed by accumulation of scores assigned to individual attributes (Babbie, 1979:399). They require that items are unidimensional and have closer relationships amongst themselves (not having much variance). Our statements met these requirements.
Evaluating the attitudes of the deans
We had to evaluate the attitudes of the deans towards the leadership roles expected of them as established by the steps taken in the previous section. Since the leadership styles are derived from the roles (an index based on four statements on managerial behaviours), this step was to finally enable us to establish the attitudes of the deans towards the leadership styles. There are two ways of evaluating the attitudes of the deans, i.e. indirectly and directly. By the indirect way, attitudes are measured by multiplying the strengths of behavioural beliefs towards performing a role by the evaluation of the outcome referring to how favourable the outcomes are to a person. In this way, we would have had to ask the deans the perceived strength of the consequences of the leadership behaviours and the favourability of the consequences of these behaviours. We however opted to measure attitudes in a direct way by means of statements that combined both the behavioural beliefs and the evaluation of outcomes of the deans towards performing the leadership behaviours. This was done for pragmatic reasons, which enabled shortening the questionnaire considerably without loss of information.
We presented the deans with sixteen statements on a seven point Likert Scale ranging from 1 (not important at all) to 7 (extremely important). Each of the eight roles was represented by two statements in our instrument as presented in Table 4.2.
The deans were to indicate which of the eight roles were the most important to them and thus the most likely for them to perform. By this, they demonstrated their attitudes towards each of the roles. We accumulated the scores of the two statements making up each role by creating an index for each in the same way as we
did for the leadership roles discussed in the preceding section. This step enabled us to attain the attitude score of each dean for each of the eight roles.
Table 4.2: Statements of attitude
Question: In running my school/faculty/institute, I think that………(on a scale from 1 (not important at all) to 7 (extremely important)
Managerial leadership
roles
Attitude statements
Innovator • creative policy making, having guts and being enterprising without fearing too much the consequences in case of failure is
• an on-going encouragement for change and innovation in the faculty, for instance by creating sufficient space and time for brainstorming is Broker • a good policy network inside and outside the university is
• active engagement in formal and informal decision making at the central level of the university is
Producer • pushing academic staff to achieve ambitious, highly competitive faculty goals is
• scanning of and marketing in higher education and research markets is Director • having clear and undisputed faculty objectives is
• academic staff members knowing and accepting the strategic direction and priorities of the faculty is
Coordinator • to the extent possible the standardization of work processes to establish coherence and predictability is
• formal rules and policies hold the faculty together and that taking formal
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rules very seriously and doing things by book is
Monitor • statistical figures, elaborate documentation and management information systems are
• detailed monitoring and quality control systems for teaching and/or research is
Facilitator • a strong sense of community, with staff feeling at home and sharing objectives is
• high staff commitment through consensus-based decision making is Mentor • having concern for the personal needs of academic staff members is
• explicit attention for the individual staff members of the faculty, his or her personal development and competence is
Evaluating the subjective norms of the deans
The second determinant of behaviour is subjective norms (SN). As we have done with attitude above, we also had to evaluate the extent to which subjective norms influence the leadership behaviours of the deans. Subjective norm (SN) refers to the perception of the deans on whether their important referents expect them to perform or not to perform the behaviour. The important referents may exert pressure on the dean to behave in a certain way. Normative beliefs are the perceived behaviourial expectation of important referents. Our study identifies the important referents to the deans to be: academics (AC), fellow deans (FD), students (SD) and central university management (CM).
Our model determines subjective norms (SN) based on normative beliefs (n) and motivation to comply (m). To evaluate the normative beliefs of the deans, we presented them with a question containing four normative belief items each based on the four
leadership aspects2 of CVF on a seven point Likert scale ranging from -3 (very negative) to +3 (very positive). The statements are presented in Table 1 of Appendix C.
The second component of deans’ subjective norms is their motivation to comply with the expectations of the important referents. It is the importance with which the deans viewed the expectations of other deans, academics, students and central university management and whether they would behave according to these expectations. To evaluate their motivation to comply we presented them with four statements on a seven point Likert scale ranging from 1 (not important at all) to 7 (extremely important) as presented in Table 2 of Appendix C. We obtained the subjective norms of the deans towards the leadership styles by multiplying the means of their normative beliefs by those of their motivation to comply. We obtained their normative beliefs towards each style based on their scores in quadrants making up each leadership style.
Assessing perceived behavioural control of the deans
To assess the perceived behavioural control (existence of any barriers) of the deans towards the leadership styles, we initially formulated eleven items, representing possible barriers deans could encounter in executing the leadership styles. The absence of barriers to the deans in performing the behaviours would mean they have actual control over the performance of behaviours. The details of the implications of perceived behavioural controls and actual controls have been discussed in section 2.3.1. The deans were asked to score these items on a seven point Likert scale (see Table 6.9) ranging from -3 (absolutely false) to 3 (absolutely true).
We realised that two statements out of the eleven were not consistent with the others. We removed these statements and remained with nine statements (see Appendix D) of perceived behavioural controls. We assessed the extent to which the
2These four aspects are clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy, just as in the quadrants of CVF. Ideally, we would have asked about their normative beliefs on the eight CVF leadership roles, but for pragmatic reasons (length of the survey) we have decided to focus on four aspects, containing two roles each. This reduced the number of questions asked about the normative beliefs and motivation to comply by half.
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deans reported to have control (perceived no barriers or constraints) regarding the performance of the leadership styles based on the remaining nine statements of barriers that could constrain their performance of the eight leadership roles.
Background factors
Our theoretical model assumes that background factors could influence the attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control of the deans and thus influence their leadership styles. Amongst these we included factors such as age, gender, the legal status of the university, duration in office as dean, size of university and nature of university (religious or secular). The questionnaire survey had questions based on these variables to which the deans had to respond. These were important in understanding if these variables could affect the leadership styles of the deans.