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Toward a Particularistic Approach to Leadership Style: Some Findings

1969; SAGE Publishing; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.3102/00028312006001062

1935-1011

Thomas J. Sergiovanni, Richard Metzcus, Larry Burden,

Attention Economy in Education and Business

Although a number of studies have approached the leadership problem from an organizational context, little attention has been given to the orientation of organizational members. Basically, researchers have tended to focus upon the leader and his behavior, often to the virtual exclusion of organizational members, their behavior, and their orientation relative to the leader. In this paper some of the pertinent research relative to conceptual structures of leadership behavior is examined, and a number of general hypotheses which relate need orientations of teachers to leadership style preferences are tested. The study is reported in two parts. The first part examines the relationship between perceived leadership style and need orientations of teachers. It was found that teachers with different need orientations responded similarly in describing ideal behavior of principals. This led to a reevaluation of the conceptual framework and a reformulation of the general hypotheses. The new hypotheses suggested that although teachers with different need orientations agreed on descriptions of ideal principal behavior, differences in preferences would occur in terms of quality of style. (Quality, as suggested later in the paper, refers to an optimizing leadership style as opposed to a controlling leadership style.) Teachers, regardless of need orientations, expressed similar