Appendix:
The Research Basis for This Book
WHILE LEADERSHIP IN HIGHER EDUCATION is written as a practical guide to enhance and support the abilities of higher-education leaders at all levels, the principles and practices described are based solidly in research.
Our work on leadership has its origins in a research project we began in 1983. We wanted to know what leaders did when they operated at their “personal best” in leading others. These were experiences in which people set, in their own perception, their individual leadership standard of excellence. We started with an assumption that to discover best practices we didn’t have to interview and survey star performers in excellent companies. Instead we assumed that by asking people at all levels and across a broad array of organizational settings to describe extraordinary experiences, we would find and identify patterns of success.
The original Personal-Best Leadership Experience survey consisted of 38 open-ended questions; here is a sampling:
Who initiated the project?
How prepared were you for this experience?
What special techniques and strategies did you use to get other people involved in the project?
How would you describe the character or feel of the experience?
What did you learn about leadership from this experience?
The survey generally required one to two hours to complete, and more than 550 of these in-depth surveys were collected during the initial phase of our research. A short, two-page form was also completed by another group of 780 managers.
In addition to the written case studies, we conducted 42 in-depth interviews, primarily with managers in middle- to senior-level organizational positions in a wide variety of both public and private-sector companies from around the world. The interviews generally took 45 to 60 minutes. Since these initial studies, our ongoing research files now include more than 5,000 personal-best cases (and over 10,000 cases using the short form), and we’ve interviewed more than 500 people around the globe, representing individuals from all types of organizations and from all levels and functions.
The Leadership Practices Inventory was created both to validate the findings of our qualitative studies and to provide an assessment measure to help people develop their leadership abilities. The items on the LPI were derived by recording specific one-sentence descriptions of behavior demonstrated in the Personal-Best Leadership Experiences. Statements were selected, modified, or discarded following lengthy discussions and iterative feedback sessions with respondents and subject-matter experts, as well as through empirical analyses of the behavior-based statements.
The LPI contains 30 statements, six essential behaviors associated with each of The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership. Participating individuals complete the LPI-Self and request five to 10 people familiar with their behavior to complete the LPI-Observer. The LPI-Observer is voluntary, and respondents indicate their relationship to the leader (manager, coworker/peer, direct report, or other). Except for the manager, identification of the observers is anonymous. The LPI takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. Each behavioral statement uses a 10-point Likert scale, and a higher value represents more frequent use of a leadership behavior. The anchors for the scale are: (1) Almost never do what is described in the statement, (2) Rarely, (3) Seldom, (4) Once in a while, (5) Occasionally, (6) Sometimes, (7) Fairly often, (8) Usually, (9) Very frequently, and (10) Almost always do what is described in the statement. Scores on the five leadership practices can range from 6 to 60; scores on the overall LPI (combining all five practices) can range from 30 to 300.
The Five Practices framework and the LPI have been in use for more than 35 years, both in applied leadership development settings and in hundreds of research projects. More than 3.7 million people from over 200 countries have completed the LPI 360 Online; of these more than 575,000 are leaders, and the remainder are observers, including the leaders’ managers, coworkers/peers, and direct reports. Using this online format provides access to a large, international sample comprising sincerely interested and committed participants who are engaging in natural behavior, rather than performing in the context of a research study. The LPI is a well-established means of conceptualizing leadership that has demonstrated applicability across settings and cultures.
Research that we and other researchers have conducted over the years consistently confirms the reliability and validity of the LPI and The Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership model. Reliability from a research perspective is about consistency or “repeatability.” This means that the instrument (assessment, survey, questionnaire) would give the same result over and over again, assuming that what was being measured isn’t changing. (Remember that reliability is a characteristic of a measure taken across individuals and doesn’t speak to the reliability (consistency) of an individual.)
Scores will seldom, if ever, be 100 percent reliable (that is, identical) because of random errors (often referred to as “noise”) that cause scores to differ for reasons unrelated to the individual respondent. The fewer errors contained, the more reliable the instrument. Instrument reliabilities above 0.60 are considered good; those above 0.80 are very strong. The internal reliabilities for the LPI, as measured by Cronbach alpha coefficients, are consistently strong and generally above 0.81.
Another consideration for examining the reliability of any instrument is how it might vary as a result of individual or organizational differences. The lack of systematic variations would indicate that the instrument is quite robust and would be safe (reliable) to apply across various sample population characteristics. All in all, LPI scores have been found to be independent of various demographic characteristics (e.g., age, marital status, years of experience, educational level, ethnicity) and organizational features (e.g., size, functional area, length of service, line versus staff position, industry).
Reliability is a first-order investigation of a framework or instrument and is necessary but not sufficient to determine whether one can be reasonably confident that it truly measures what it purports to measure and whether its scores (results) have meaning or utility for a respondent. From a practical perspective, this is the answer to the so what? question, as in, So what difference do my scores make in terms of some substantive outcome? This is called validity.
Like reliability, validity is determined in a number of ways. The most common assessment of validity is called face validity, which considers whether, on the basis of subjective evaluation, an instrument appears to measure what it intends to measure. Given that the items on the LPI are related to the qualitative findings from interviews with leaders and echo the comments that workshop and seminar participants generally make about their own or others’ Personal-Best Leadership Experiences, respondents have found the LPI to have excellent face validity.
Validity is also determined empirically (objectively). Factor analysis is used to determine the extent to which the instrument items measure common or different content areas. The results from various analyses reveal that the LPI contains five factors, the items within each factor (representing a leadership practice) corresponding more among themselves than they do with the other factors.
The question of whether LPI scores are significantly related to other critical behavioral (individual and organizational) performance measures is probably the most important practical matter to leaders and their organizations. The answer to this issue is generally referred to as predictive validity. Scores of studies have shown that the leadership practices and behaviors measured by the LPI are consistently associated with important aspects of managerial and organizational effectiveness such as workgroup performance, team cohesiveness, commitment, satisfaction, and credibility.
Abstracts of more than 700 of these studies can be found on our website, leadershipchallenge.com/research, including more than 120 conducted within higher education. Among these are investigations of college presidents, academic deans and department chairs, librarians, counseling directors, and student personnel administrators. There are studies examining the impact of leadership practices on faculty job satisfaction, transformational leadership of athletic directors and head coaches, the relationship between leadership and emotional intelligence, the leadership effectiveness of residence hall directors, demographic differences of leadership practices within a historically black university, and so on. Moreover, researchers have looked at leadership in a variety of higher-education settings and environments; for example, public and private schools, secular and nonsecular campuses, two-year and four-year colleges, on-campus and online programs, as well as institutions inside and outside the United States.
In this book are specific references to the research most directly applicable to higher education. This data and analysis draw on a subsection of the Kouzes Posner normative LPI database, a sample of more than 125,000 people in higher education who completed the LPI and provided information about themselves and how they feel about their organization and their leaders. Each chapter includes data about the impact of leadership on people and how consistently the most effective leaders in higher education are the ones who make the most frequent use of The Five Practices.
In addition to the quantitative data, we collected Personal-Best Leadership Experience cases from more than 100 people in a variety of roles in higher education—president’s office, campus safety, library, athletics, student activities, housing, public safety, alumni relations, health centers, and other campus organizations and functions. Their stories and case studies bring the data to life. They show you more specifically what exemplary leadership practices and behaviors look like and the positive impact they have. They illustrate that leadership is not something available to only a few select leaders in an institution. They are evidence that leadership is a set of skills and abilities available to everyone on campus.
We know from our research that the more frequently you put The Five Practices to use, the more effective you will be in bringing out the best in your group, department, and institution. The opportunity is there. The evidence is there. What remains, as we say in the closing of chapter 7, is: “Decide to do something different that will make you an even better leader. Then hop off the log and get into the water!”