Interpretation of a Poorly Conceived Survey Term Paper

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Management

The survey was sent to 87 managers in these two organizations, and there were 32 responses. The survey focused on four main questions, all of which were open-ended in nature, therefore not lending themselves to statistical analysis. This section will cover the responses to the four questions.

The first research question was " What does leadership and progress mean to employees at these companies and are they different form other companies?" There are obviously two components to this question. The first component is what leadership means to the employees at these companies. The surveys indicated that the managers at these two companies felt that leadership was important, and this was the view of 31 managers out of the 32 who responded. Not surprisingly, those in leadership positions felt that they were contributing something positive to the organization, and that employees responded well to their leadership. Most respondents indicated that leadership was either "important" or "very important." At this point in the survey, there was no discussion of leadership style, so no links can be made from this data as to whether or not the importance of leadership relates to the leadership style.

The second part of this question is whether these two companies are different from other companies in this respect. The study did not include any data from other companies, so no direct comparison of results could be made. Studies on the importance of leadership tend to focus on specific roles that leadership plays, such as leading through merger & acquisition activity (Sitkin & Pablo, 2005) or in shaping business values (Ciulla, 1999). This means that there is no way to determine whether leadership is more important at these two companies than any other company. There is no intuitive reason why it should be, but the research design did not even test this hypothesis.

The second research question was "which models of leadership best fit the leadership profiles that are present with in the organizations?" The respondents were provided with a quick primer on leadership styles, but that did not stop them from going off the board in a lot of their answers. The respondents did not understand the concepts that were presented to them for the most part. The most common answer among established leadership theories was that of transformational leadership, which 6 leaders felt best described leadership found within the organization. Five responded positively to transactional leadership, showing perhaps a schism between the different leadership styles that are present in the organizations. Two responded positively to the Great Man Theory, and one to Trait Theory. The other respondents delivered a fairly wide range of theories, ranging from ones that have some basis in the literature (ethical leadership) to things like "good leadership" and "incompetent leadership" that are not present in the literature. These responses illustrated that many managers, even those in leadership positions, may not have studied leadership and were not familiar with the concepts, at least not familiar enough to provide a reasonable answer.

The third question was "How has gender and diversity affected the leadership profiles in these companies?" This is another open-ended question, one that the respondents did not actually manage to answer. It was probably written poorly. The main issue with the responses here is that the respondents did not understand the leadership profiles. The objective of the question was to determine whether increasing diversity in leadership had an effect on the styles the leaders used most commonly. Many managers did not understand the leadership styles concept, and a few other indicated that they did not have much experience in their company, so could not say how things were in the past. Only five responses were of value in this question. Three indicated no change, two more indicated a shift towards transformative leadership styles. The latter would be expected, as there has been a general shift towards that type of leadership. In many cases, it would also be expected that leadership styles would not change, especially in situations where the leader does not change, or where promotions are strongly based on tenure so that more progressive thinkers do not receive promotions.

Others who had no understood the concepts also indicated that there was no change, but since they did not understand the ideas in Question 2, they would also have not understood the ideas in Question 3. Others indicated that there were more women and minorities in leadership positions now, but of course this was the baseline assumption for the question, so they were in essence not answering the actual question that was being asked.

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The fourth question was "how can the lessons learned from the above questions be translated into action that will result in leadership development and grooming of future leaders?" This is a very open-ended question that basically yielded 32 different responses. They ranged from "No idea" to long paragraphs explaining what needed to be done. Conceptually, the question reflects a need to draw conclusions from the present understanding of leadership to future actions on leadership training. Only a handful of responses seemed to demonstrate understanding of this.

The better responses reflected thoughtfulness. One respondent noted that the company should have a target leadership style for different departments or positions, and would benefit from training programs that focused on finding and developing people to fit specific leadership roles. This respondent noted that some departments are strongly transactional in nature, while others rely heavily on innovation. Such departments would require entirely different leadership styles.

Overall, there were some issues with the responses. The questions were framed in an open-ended manner, and they relied on the respondents to have some base conceptual knowledge. In hindsight, many respondents did not have this knowledge and did not learn from the information that was provided. A more structured set of survey questions might have been more valuable, in terms of generating results that would be subject to statistical analysis, or that would have demonstrated clearly that the respondents were on the same page as the survey writer with respect to what the question was about. Such challenges are a learning experience, but unfortunately leave the study as a mixed bag in terms of its results.

It was also a fault in the research design that the issue of other companies was introduced in a research question but then not built into the study design. Obviously, people who are in these two companies would not be able to accurately assess the situation at other companies -- this was an error that would be best remedied by forgetting that the second part of the first research question exists. It remains a valid question, but a methodological error prevented this study from answering it.

There was weak support for the first clause of the first research question. The managers surveyed indicated that leadership was important in their companies. However, their positions as leaders may have biased the responses. Moreover, that the responses were overwhelming positive does not indicate much that can be learned, nothing actionable. If leadership is important, but it is always important, that certainly means that steps can be taken to improve the quality of leadership at a company, but what sort of improvements would require a deeper understanding of leadership than was identified in the subsequent research questions.

There was no real support for any one leadership type. There were some responses, but they offered a mix of types, and many responses indicated that the respondents had a much lower level of understanding of formal leadership theory than the author. In hindsight, this makes sense. Some would have studied leadership, but others may have come from different backgrounds and not have had the benefit of formal leadership studies. The supplemental materials were clearly insufficient to generate a stronger response from the respondents.

The lack of understanding of formal leadership theory manifested itself in the third question as well. No meaningful support was given to the null hypothesis for this question. An additional issue here is that judgments were being asked of the leaders to compare the current state of the company with an unspecified time in the past when maybe there was less diversity in leadership. Insufficient clarity in the question leads to insufficient responses.

The fourth question was very open-ended, to the point where the responses differed rather wildly. There was no single response that can be said to have appeared in a statistically significant number of responses. The researcher might have been better to interpret this from a different set of questions. Vaguely, the only real conclusion is that there should be leadership training at these companies, and that leaders should be chosen on merit rather than tenure.

Alternative Interventions

There are several potential interventions to improve the quality of leadership. First, given the lack of knowledge of leadership theory in these companies, education on leadership theory is one potential intervention. By understanding how different leaders influence the organization, the people who are in leadership positions can move from their….....

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