My apologies to the list. I meant for this to only go to George Dodd.
I have initiated a retraction command, but it you get this, please
disregard and discard.
Thank you.
Ed
Drive On!
>>> Edward Hampton <
ehampton@MAIL.UCF.EDU> 03/30 1:15 PM >>>
George,
Thank you for this very cogent and informative post.
I am the interim director for a leadership program (LEAD Scholars) at
the University of Central Florida. I would be interested anything you
might share about your work that you might deem useful to 300
competitively selected freshmen and sophomores, either on developing
their leadership or concepts/thoughts that may be of interest to them.
I am personally fascinated by the idea of an organization
intentionally
studying leadership. Twenty three years in the Army as an Armor
officer
has forced me to be student of leadership. I would love the
opportuntity to apply my experience to your work or to engage in
leadership dialogue.
Attached, please find two items: an overview of LEAD Scholars and my
CV.
Hope one or the other - preferably both - will stimulate enought
interest to begin meaningful dialogue.
Best wishes for continued success.
Ed
Drive On!
>>> George Dodge <
otdod@TTACS.TTU.EDU> 03/30 10:46 AM >>>
>On Mon, 29 Mar 1999 11:04:33 +0100 Geoff Atkinson
<
Geoff@CHANGENET.CO.UK>
wrote (Subject: Re: >Leadership
Outcomes and Measures of Them)
> My understanding of outcome is in the context of a system - what
we DO leads to some RESULTS, which are the
>outputs of the system. When these outputs take their course, the
state
reached is the outcome - outside the
system. (SNIP)
> Using this systems model, I am extremely interested in the
other
part of the answer to George's original
question posed. >(SNIP) My suggestions for the list of outcomes
include:- change delivered effectively (I believe
leadership to be necessary >only in changing situations) - increased
ongoing staff motivation and commitment -
better ongoing communication and decision >making .. but I repeat that
much will be situational. Certainly the
organisations who invest millions in leadership training >deserve more
than an "act of faith" that their cash is
returning value.
> I'd be interested if we could re-boot this thread for a few more
responses, focusing on outcomes rather than
activity >measures.
In an effort to reboot the leadership measures thread:
Clearly, there are two distinct areas of interest. First is what
are the leader's behaviors, characteristics,
KSA, and congnitions. Second, given those, what impact, if any, do
they have on parts of the organization, the
entire organization, and on external stakeholders. Pfeffer, Meindel,
Lord and Maher and others would argue that
the link between nominal leader actions and organizational
consequences
are tentative at best. The best a leader
can hope for is some "symbolic" impact. Any other attribution of
organizational effects and leader behavior has
more to do with subordinate perceptions and theories of organization
than any real relationship.
Hunt, Quinn, Bass and others argure, on the other hand, that
leadership does make a difference in terms of
organizational outcomes. The question, according to Hunt, is where
and
when does leadership make a difference? He
also advocates the use of multiple measures to assess leadership
outcomes. These outcomes can affect stakeholders
within the organization (leadership in organizatons) or they can
affect
the organizaiton at large and/or its
external stakeholders (leadership of organizations). This dichotomy is
further complicated by the different levels
of leadership (or leadership strata) within the organization. Much
has been written about the lower strata and
very little about the upper or strategic levels (except by business
policy scholars).
Given the richness of the field of leadership, both tradtional
leadership and the new leadership, it is
important to find psychometrically sound measures of both leader
behavior and characteristics and leadership
outcomes if our research is to amount to anything. Virtually all of
the leadership measures I know of have either
psychometric problems or computational problems. Take the MLQ and its
multcolinearity problem, for example. I
recently reviewed an examination of Kouzes and Posner's LPI where
virtually all of their measures loaded onto a
single factor. Needless to say we have problems in the area of
leadership measures.
Some leadership consultants I have talked to admit that the
science
behind the measures and tools they use in
training and leadership interventions is weak at best. They use the
measures, however, as a means of stimulating
discussion and self examination.
Given the measurement problems, we should use the best available
but be aware of their shortfalls. My
motivation in trying to catalog both measures of leader behavior and
characteristics and leadership outcomes is to
provide leadership researchers with a ready reference of the tools
available and in use as well as the set of
appropriate caveats.
George Dodge
Institute for Leadership Research
Texas Tech University