APPENDIX II: PILOT STUDY INTO LEADERSHIP DICHOTOMIES
This pilot study was conducted in the initial phase of the PhD trajectory and provided very interesting
insights which have triggered the final direction of this PhD dissertation. The initial interest was to
explore to what extent leaders can integrate opposite leadership behaviors. Contrary to what one may
have expected on the basis of the literature, people- and task-oriented leadership were significantly
positively correlated. A second observation was the overlap between behaviors. Transactional and
task-oriented leadership showed a strong overlap, to the extent that they seemed to represent a same
factor. Transformational leadership partly overlapped with people-oriented leadership, yet it was
distinct to the extent that transformational leadership included a long term focus and a focus on
innovation. This seemed to be a separate factor, distinct from task- or people-oriented leadership. A
third insight dealt with the primary tensions that were identified by the leaders in question being the
opposition at play within the organization, between task- and people-oriented leadership, and the
tension between short-term and long-term oriented leadership, which was related to the interaction of
the organization with its environment.
This pilot study was aimed at identifying the primary leadership tensions from the leader point of
view. A second aim was to gain insight into the relationship of several leadership behaviors as
conceptualized in leadership theory. Amidst the abundance of different typologies of leadership
behavior, findings on the relationship between the different behavioral types was considered to be
inconsistent. As theory and empirical data have been inconsistent when considering the relationship
between seemingly opposite leadership behaviors, an exploratory study was required in order to get a
better grasp of the underlying relationship between leadership behaviors. This study included an
exploratory factor analysis of behavioral items drawn from validated measures for task and people
leadership and transactional and transformational leadership. Managers from various organizations
scored themselves on these different leadership behaviors.
Method
Sample
As part of a study on coaching (Dell et al., 2009), questions related to competing leadership functions,
i.e. task- versus people-oriented leadership and transformational versus transactional leadership, were
posed to middle and top-level manager from various organizations, operating in different industries.
Coaching has been one of the fastest growing new trends in leadership development over the past 10