Critical Perspectives On Educational Leadership

John Smyth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135388584
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book is an edited collection of original papers which challenge in a very direct manner the dominant behviourist and functionalist views that have come to entrap those who live, work and conduct research in the areas of educational leadership, and focusing instead on the structures and processes within schools as organisations that frustrate, distort and ultimately stifle educative relationships the writers provide a much needed way of reconceptualising both thought and action in so-called acts of educational leadership.

Chapter 1 Leadership, Power and Symbols in Educational Administration

Peter Watkins

The traditional approach to administration and its off-spring educational administration lies within the fiunctionalist paradigm. Indeed, as Burrell and Morgan (1979) have amply illustrated, the bulk of the theoretical debate and research on organizations is accounted for within this paradigm. A major concern of those within the functionalist school is to explore the extent that the designated leaders of organizations determine the outcomes of the organization and the behaviour of its lower ranks (March and Simon, 1958). But this perception of administration presents a static one-directional view of leadership in which the superordinate or leader leads an anonymous, unquestioning mass of subordinates or followers. Administrative research and theory is looked on to serve and give support to those in positions of administrative power, thereby conserving and reproducing the status quo. Moreover, the resultant theory and research ‘invokes the unarticulated assumption that managers are both more important and more variable than workers, and that their behaviour is thereby more worthy of study and intervention’ (Goldman, 1978, p.24). Such an approach to the study of administration reflects the belief that ‘the functionalist researcher/consultant and manager are joined in a similar search: a search for predictability and control’ (Smircich, 1983, p.223). One of the foremost theorists of the functionalist paradigm, Merton, has conceded that with regard to the sponsorship of research:

Of the limited body of social research in industry, the greater part has been orientated towards the needs of management. The problems selected as the focus of the inquiry…have been largely thus defined by management, sponsorship has been typically by management, the limits and character of experimental changes in the work situation have been passed upon by management, and periodic reports have been made primarily to management. No matter how good or seemingly self-evident the reason, it should be noted that this is the typical perspective of social research in industry, and that it limits the effective prosecution of the research. (Merton, 1968, p.625)

Giddens’ criticism of functionalism goes further, claiming that its influence has been largely pernicious (1984, p.xxxi). By ascribing rationality to social systems, not to human beings, the functionalist approach does not give an adequate explanation of anything (Giddens, 1984, p.294).

However, recently a number of scholars in administration have presented a view of organizations which stresses the activities of all members and the emancipatory potential of administration (e.g., Forester, 1982a, 1982b; Deetz and Kersten, 1983; Denhardt, 1981; Benson, 1977; Knights and Wilmott, 1982). While the work of these authors has had a considerable impact, it is probably premature in educational administration to argue, as Giddens does with regard to functionalism, that ‘the battlefield is largely empty, even if from time to time isolated bolts continue to be launched’ (1977, p.96). Nevertheless, because the traditional approach toward leadership and power has exerted such a powerful influence, firstly a critique of that approach in those two areas will be offered; secondly an alternative approach, viewed from two dimensions, will be suggested; and lastly the implications of these approaches will be discussed.

Traditional Views of Leadership and Power

This chapter explores alternatives in leadership to the traditional, functionalist view. The search for alternatives stems from my personal experience over many years in schools that leadership does not necessarily emanate from the senior administrative posts of a school, and from the dissatisfaction of students of educational administration whom I have taught that the traditional views of leadership bear no resemblance to what actually goes on in schools. In many situations the senior administrators, while frequently being members of various school committees, often find that their qualifications, interests or predilections preclude them from being the driving force in the ever-changing organizational life of a school. Traditional stances in leadership take for granted the one-directional flow from the leader to the led, from the principal to the school community, without realizing the reality in which a junior member of staff may be the leader and the principal the follower. More starkly, in the recently reconstituted school councils in Victoria, which entail significant student representation, a student may feasibly arise as a leader in a certain area while principal, teachers and parents become followers.

Thus it would seem to be a futile exercise blandly to label a principal of a school as a leader when anyone in the school community might arise in certain situations at certain times to become what might be termed a leader. The problem seems to be that too often what is in reality a power relationship is obscured by the label of leadership. The result is that the literature on leadership adopts a fairly descriptive, simplistic and naive view of the concept. As McCall and Lombardo put it:

the accumulated data, even when pulled together, are still contradictory, ambiguous, and narrow. Improvement of our understanding of leadership apparently does not lie in pursuing existing trends or in attempting to integrate existing research. Conceptually and methodologically, leadership research has bogged down. (1978, p.151)

Greenfield (in Macpherson, 1984) has labelled the traditional approaches to leadership as being characterized by superficiality. Manz and Sims (1984) in expressing similar disappointment point to problems of declining productivity, absenteeism and increasing contestation in the workplace as indications that ‘traditional approaches to leadership and work design are no longer adequate’(p.410). Sergiovanni (1987) in a change of perspective has acknowledged that the traditional or transactional, as he calls it, view of leadership has run its course and ‘can deliver no more than it has with respect to insights and understandings of leadership and management’ (1987, p.6). The following discussion of traditional approaches to leadership illustrates why they have fallen into disrepute.

Leadership: A Critique of the Traditional Views

In this section it will be argued that the trait approach, the Ohio situationalist approach and Fiedler’s contingency model approach to leadership are static, ahistorical and ideologically based (Watkins, 1986). Moreover, it will be illustrated that the functionalist leadership perspective operates in an authoritative way to sanitize the unequal power relations within an organization. The result is that the class relations inherent within a superordinate and subordinate social hierarchy of the school (see Wright, 1979; Watkins, 1983; and Salaman, 1981) are legitimized and mystified through the ‘motherhood’ concept of leadership.

The Trait Approach

In the major conceptual and empirical approaches to research into leadership, the initial emphasis was on distinguishing certain ‘leadership traits’ in the individual’s personality or physical make-up. Advocates of the trait approach have spent a considerable time attempting to correlate leadership behaviour and such physical and personality traits as age, height, weight, appearance, fluency of speech, intelligence, introversion/ extroversion. Stogdill (1970, original 1948) investigated 124 papers in an attempt to determine the validity of the trait studies of leaders. He found that the correlations, while positive, were low, and that contradictory findings were common. The evidence suggested that ‘leadership is a relation that exists between persons in a social situation, and that persons who are leaders in one situation may not necessarily be leaders in other situations’ (Stogdill, 1970, p.126). If leadership is situationally based, then traits are of little consequence.

The findings of Stogdill indicated that leadership is not a matter of passive status or of the mere possession of some combination of traits. Also Janda (1960) has pointed out that the five basic factors listed by Stogdill (capacity, achievement, responsibility, participation, status) were characteristics of the leader. It was still unclear whether leadership referred to:

the behaviour of this individual in interaction with other group members;

the behaviour of this individual as a group member—perhaps with differentiated role functions to perform;

the behaviour of other group members in interaction with the member designated as leader;

the social relationships which existed between the leader and other group members;

all of the above;

none of the above.

Thus, while Stogdill helped to cast light on what might be the comparative fruitfulness of the trait approach, he did not clarify what is actually entailed in leadership. No unifying conceptual development was suggested. However, his basic conclusion that the ‘qualities, characteristics and skills required in a leader are determined to a large extent by the demands of the situation in which he is to function as a leader’ (Stogdill, 1970, p.123) led to establishment of the Ohio situationalist school as the next main development in leadership studies.

But despite the devastating critiques of the trait approach it has persisted in various forms. Very often rather than certain traits being attributed by people to some idealized hero, organizational founders reconstructed history to foster the notion of a ‘great man’. Myths were created by public relations men and those ideologically committed to a particular construction of social reality. Teulings (1980) in a perceptive study of the Philips company and the family which controls it comments that:

The great man approach tends to attribute company successes to the purposeful behaviour of a clairvoyant captain of industry, and failures to the unpredictable, uncontrollable turbulances of the environment, or to the fate of time.

Once in use this myth becomes a functional prerequisite for the viability of the company as a private enterprise. The myth provides a symbolic continuity, sustains the role of family ownership and prevents the downfall of the great leader, even when he does not distinguish himself at all by acts of wisdom or foresight. (Teulings, 1980, p.153a)

Thus the trait approach still finds favour because it often presents those idealized characteristics with which people would like to typify their imagined symbolic heroes. In addition the approach has been nurtured by business magnates to justify their own position through myths and legends that endorse their prowess (see Angus, this volume). However, because the trait approach was obviously simplistic and could not withstand close scrutiny, the more complex situational approach was developed as part of the human relations strategy of management (see Perrow, 1986a).

The Situational Approach

The situational approach views leadership in terms of function performed rather than in terms of particular leadership traits. This emphasis on the function of leaders dominated the literature on leadership during the 1950s. Halpin (1955) states that this was a natural result of the surveys of Gibb in 1954 and Stogdill in 1948, which indicated that leadership was a ‘complex social phenomenon that cannot be treated meaningfully when conceived as an isolated trait or entity viewed apart from related group and institutional factors’ (1955, pp.18–19).

The main work on the situational approach came from members of the Personnel Research Board at Ohio State University, especially Hemphill, Stogdill and Shartle. The Ohio school sought to define leadership behaviour in terms of certain situational variables such as the nature and distance of group goal, motivation of the group, etc. As these factors vary with the situation, leadership would also vary. Describing leader behaviour was an amalgam of the perceptions of the leader’s subordinates and the way in which the leader himself perceived his own attitude toward his role. The notions of ‘consideration’ and ‘initiating structure’ were isolated as basic dimensions of leadership behaviour in formal organizations.

These two dimensions of leader behaviour were used in the Halpin and Winer (Halpin, 1955) adaptation of Hemphill and Coons’ original Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire (LBDQ). Halpin used the questionnaire to attempt to measure leadership ideology and leadership style in both the US Air Force and public education.

Halpin’s studies of educational administrators and aircraft commanders promoted a view of effective leadership which is characterized by high initiation of structure and high consideration (1969, p.313). However, Greenwood and McNamara’s research (in Wrightsman and Deaux, 1981) indicates that the relationships between consideration and initiating structure are generally low. Thus a supervisor who keeps his employees task orientated would not be particularly considerate. This would also indicate that there is independence in regard to success in achieving the two dimensions of leadership.

Graen et al. (1972), in reviewing research on the dimensions of consideration and structure, claimed that ‘research on the two dimensions of leadership style proposed and operationalized by the Ohio State researchers has not advanced much beyond the initial descriptive stage’(p.216). Indeed, Greenfield describes the LBDQ-based research as unusually restrictive and static. As he puts it, ‘At best, the LBDQ gives us a single Brownie camera shot of a complex and obscure process. We know that much went on before we took the photograph; we know that much will go on after it; and we know that our fuzzy LBDQ snapshot represents only a tiny part of what was going on at the time it was taken’ (1979, p.178). Similarly Janda (1960) and Yukl (1971) point out that most research has been conducted as if leadership were a unique phenomenon, although most of the conceptions of leadership can be explained in more basic variables. This simplistic, static view of leadership has led researchers to exclude intermediate and situational variables such as power and class relationships. But the consideration of these may be necessary in order to understand how leaders’ actions can affect the productivity or well-being of their subordinates.

Intensive contemporary reviews of the literature by Sayles (1966), Lowin (1968), Korman (1966) and Campbell et al. (1970) indicated that the relation of leader behaviour to subordinate productivity and satisfaction with the leader was still unclear.

Korman (1966) found that there was very little evidence that leadership behavioural and/or attitudinal variation, as defined by scores on the Leadership Behaviour and Leadership Opinion Questionnaire, were predictive of later effectiveness and/or satisfaction criteria. From his investigation it appears that the majority of validity studies provide no evidence, even in cases of positive relationships, that variation on the above scales predicts different kinds of worker behaviour. His other main criticism was of the research designs of the studies investigating the situational approach. While they emphasize that the effects of ‘consideration’ and ‘initiating structure’ have become almost bywords in American industrial psychology, it seems apparent that very little is known about how these variables may predict work group performance or about conditions which affect such predictions. Korman concluded then, and it might be suggested still, ‘we cannot even say whether they have any predictive significance at all’ (1966, p.360).

But while the situationalist approach to leadership was seen to be virtually worthless on its own terms, of controlling and extracting more work from subordinates, it has also been criticized for working by stealth in seeking to manipulate the employees of organizations (see Leavitt, 1964; Perrow, 1986a; and Tinker and Lowe, 1982). By ignoring inequalities of organizational power, it implied an acceptance of the power status quo. Industrial psychologists sought to present a conception of leadership which might meet the socioemotional needs of workers, ‘thus ending various kinds of irrational hostility in the factory and the “need” for workers to unite in opposition to management (i.e., via unionisation)’ (Bramel and Friend, 1981, p.868). Such manipulative ploys by both industrial psychologists and industrial sociologists were recognized by workers as the management strategies that they clearly were. Indeed, the United Auto Workers described some in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Deakin Studies in Education Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Editors’ Introduction
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Leadership, Power and Symbols in Educational Administration
• Chapter 2 Toward a Critical Practice of Leadership
• Chapter 3 ‘New’ Leadership and the Possibility of Educational Reform
• Chapter 4 Educational Leadership: A Feminist Critique and Reconstruction
• Chapter 5 Leadership and the Rationalization of Society
• Chapter 6 Educational Leadership as Reflective Action
• Chapter 7 A ‘Pedagogical’ and ‘Educative’ View of Leadership
• Chapter 8 In Defence of Organizational Democracy
• Notes on Contributors