RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
4.8 Research instruments
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white collar jobs, however people over 18 years of age are studying for higher education degrees, working or unemployed (Statistics South Africa, 2013).
iii. Reporting to the Unit Heads
The respondents to the questionnaires were required to be those employees who were reporting directly or indirectly to the unit heads. The employees who reported to other managers and superiors were not targeted by the study as they were less able to provide accurate and relevant information about their leaders.
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to gain a deeper understanding of the leadership style at eThekwini Municipality through one-on-one interview sessions which were conducted with the respective unit heads. The interviews were recorded using a recording device and transcribed for data analysis. All the interview questions were intended to answer the research questions and address the research objectives. The interview questions are explained below:
i. Construction of the interview questions
The first part of the interview addressed the leaders’ perceptions and views about their leadership style. Sekaran and Bougie (2011) advised that at the beginning of an unstructured interview it is recommended to ask open ended questions to get a broad idea and form some impression about the situation. The first open ended question aimed to gain a general understanding of municipal leadership, as well as to gather data pertaining to the leaders’ behaviours and personality traits and benchmark these against the characteristics of transactional and transformational leadership. This helped the researcher analyse the interviewees’ characteristics according to the full range leadership theory.
The second part of the interview addressed the extent of transactional leadership qualities in the leaders of eThekwini Municipality. The researcher then compared the data gathered from the interviews to the dimensions of transactional leadership. Sekaran and Bougie (2011) stated that from the responses to the first broad question, further questions that are progressively more focused may be asked as the researcher processes the interviewees’
responses and notes some possible key issues relevant to the situation. The sub-questions addressed each of the dimensions of transactional leadership, namely contingent reward, active management by exception and passive management by exception.
The third part of the interview solicited answers with regards to the extent of transformational leadership qualities in the municipal leaders. The data gathered from this section was compared to the dimensions of transformational leadership. The sub- questions addressed each of the dimensions of transformational leadership, namely idealised influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration.
The second and third parts of the interview were used to determine which leadership style was more dominant. The leaders’ perceptions of their own leadership styles revealed
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whether the majority of the leaders deemed themselves to be transactional or transformational. The fourth and final part of the interview was open-ended, where the leaders were asked if they had any other comments or contributions that they would like to add about their leadership styles. This question intended to gather data that may have been omitted by the preceding interview questions and also to cover any aspects that the researcher may have overlooked.
The interviews were conducted in a professional manner and were recorded from start to end with no pauses or disruptions. The interviews were also conducted in a suitable environment in that appointments were set up and the seminar rooms were booked. Table 4.2 shows the interviewees in the sample:
Table 4.2: Qualitative sample: interviewees Interviewee
number Date Position/Role Unit/Department
Interviewee One
6 September 2013
Municipal Researcher
Research Department
Policy, Strategy, Information and Research
Interviewee Two
9 September
2013 Unit Head Engineering
Interviewee Three
18 September
2013 Unit Head
International Governance and Relations
Interviewee Four
19 September
2013 Unit Head
Local Economic Development and Investment Promotion
4.8.2 Quantitative instrument: structured questionnaire
A structured questionnaire was employed, with elements and part questions adapted from a standardised questionnaire proposed by Avolio and Bass (2002) - the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire – which is based on the full range leadership theory. The questionnaire was first designed for the Multifactor Leadership theory as articulated by and developed by Avolio and Bass (2002), and was also developed and extended to the full range leadership theory by Bass and Riggio (2006). The standardised questionnaire is available in Appendix 9.
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i. Construction of the structured questionnaire
The funnelling technique was applied in the construction of the research questionnaire.
According to Saunders et al. (2009) the funnel approach is when there is a transition from broad to narrow questions, i.e. in the research questionnaire the questions were arranged from general to more specific questions. This enabled the respondents to adapt to the questions and the main focus of the study. The questionnaire used a five point Likert scale which uses the anchors - strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree and strongly agree. In this study strongly disagree and disagree indicated negative scores, whereas strongly agree and agree indicated positive scores. Neutral was regarded as an impartial score denoting that the respondent did not take sides. The structured research questionnaire used to collect data in this study is available in Appendix 10.
The questionnaire was divided into four sections from section A to section D. Section A collected demographic information from the respondents including gender, age, educational qualification, race, number of years in current position, which department the respondents were in and who they reported to. The researcher used the biographic data in order to screen employees who worked for the municipality under the selected departments, as well as to see who reported directly or indirectly to the heads of units.
The identity and confidentiality of the respondents was protected as the respondents were only required to sign the informed consent form without stating their names and surnames.
Section B addressed the extent of transactional leadership according to the employees’
perspectives of their leaders. The questions in this section were pre-formulated and adapted from the MLQ Form X5. This helped the data collected to be more valid and reliable as the standardised questionnaire had been used by other researchers before and was deemed to be reliable (Purvanova et al., 2006, Walumbwa et al., 2008, Walumbwa and Hartnell, 2011). A leader is deemed to be transactional when the responses to this section are positive, but is considered to be non-transactional when the responses in this section are negative.
Section C had questions that addressed the extent of transformational leadership. This section provided the researcher with the employees’ perceptions of their leaders, which is in line with transformational leadership. The dimensions of transformational leadership
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were incorporated into the questions in this section. The bases of each dimension were identified and used to formulate the questions, together with the questions from the MLQ Form X5. The base of idealised influence is respect and at the core of inspirational motivation is articulating a shared vision. The prime aspects of inspirational motivation are encouraging employees to perform well and motivating them. Intellectual stimulation is centred on innovation. The final dimension individual consideration is concentrated on the individual attention that develops employees. A leader is deemed to be transformational when the responses to this section are positive. Conversely, the leader is considered to be non-transformational when the responses to this section are negative.
The final section of the questionnaire intended to determine which of the two leadership styles is more influential within the organisation. The leadership style identified through Sections B and C and D determined which style has more influence on the followers. This section of the questionnaire identified which leadership style has greater influence and is therefore also more effective (Bass, 1997, Bryant, 2003, Judge and Ronald, 2004, Zohar and Gazit, 2008, Ruggieri, 2009).
According to the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire put forward by Avolio and Bass (2002), positive responses to the questionnaire indicate compliance and negative responses indicate noncompliance, therefore in this study the leadership style was deemed to be influential when the responses to this section were positive, and non-influential when the responses to the section were negative.