Fenwick W. English (The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA) and Lisa Catherine Ehrich (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)
What is the problem? How does the chapter support your thinking about the problem?
There are two key issues for this chapter. The first is that the establishment of the concept of leadership style was based on a very flawed experimental design. The results of this classic experiment were never seriously challenged in the journals of the time, nor in substantive reviews or compendiums of research decades later. While there is much talk today about employing “evidenced based research” the 1939 Lewin, Lippitt and White experimental study was simply reproduced in those authoritative books and accepted as legitimate “evidence” of the concept of management style for decades after their implementation, despite the fact that when the original experiment was tried in other countries it failed to produce similar results. Nonethless there was no systematic attempt to ensure that “management style” was really “evidence based.” There may be other “classical” leadership studies that similarly would fail to proffer substantive evidence. Readers must always be aware of what is offered as “evidence” before it is simply accepted and projected as legitimate into the future. There ought to be a periodic review of all past research at designed times to be sure that what we have previously thought was solid “evidence based” is once again compared to what constitutes the most up to date thinking in the field.
What are other ways to think about this? Where can I go next to follow these up?
For research design
The criteria we used to critique the Lewin, et. al 1939 study design was the classic chapter “Experimental and Quasi-Experimental Designs for Research on Teaching” by Donald T. Campbell and Julian C. Stanley in the 1963 American Education Research Association’s Handbook of Research on Teaching. This chapter really deals with how to control for rival hypotheses. The lack of internal control over things like history, selection bias and selection-maturation interaction were striking. Then problems with external effects such as interaction effects with selection biases and the experimental arrangements and multiple-treatment interference. Doing research in the area of leadership is extremely difficult since the presence of “control groups” with decision making is exceptionally challenging. Maturation and history are almost always present in trying to establish stable yardsticks. Everything in an organization is always moving, even if control groups were possible.
Guidelines and Cautions for Leadership Research
In the U.S. the National Research Council (NRC) released its 2003 publication Scientific Research in Education which attempted to advance some guidelines about what constituted high quality research. Compared to Campbell and Stanley’s advice, one of the great barriers to doing outstanding work is that “leaders are not the result of random processes, but are contextually and culturally specific, nor are clinical trials in the sense of leadership careers generalizable in the same way as replication in scientifically controlled experiments” (English, 2007, p. 32).
The difficulties in dosess leadership. The problem with trying to keep using the same approach to studying leadership is that no new answers are obtained. Only as moves towards an alternative does such a breakthrough appear to be possible.
English and Ehrich (2019) advocate for an approach that is anchored in aesthetics instead of empirical science because such an approach is more nimble in dealing with the so-called “subjectivities” of leadership.
Moving Forward
Riveros, Newton and Burgess (2017) move to reconceptualize leadership, leadership standards and unpack the demarcation between leaders and non-leaders in Canada. This approach holds promise for providing a new type of professional field more open to varying forms of leadership research.
Recommended Readings
English, F.W. (2007). The NRC’s Scientific Research in Education: It Isn’t Even Wrong. In F.W. English and G.C. Furman (Eds.) Research and Educational Leadership: Navigating the New National Research Council Guidelines (pp. 1-38). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
English, F.W. and Ehrich, L.C. (2019).Re-examining the philosopher’s stone of leadership. International Journal of Educational Management, November 2019.0061-364x. DOI 10.1108IJEM-08-2019-0306.
Riveros, A., Newton, P. & Burgess, D. (2017). Leadership standards and the discursive repositioning of leaders, leaders and non-leaders. In G. Lakomsi, S. Eacott & C.W. Evers (Eds.) Questioning leadership: New Directions for Educational Organisations. New York: Routledge.
