an item indeed reflected Client centricity). The content experts were asked to cluster the items along
the four domains, Client centricity, Business development, Operational efficiency and Organizational
creativity. Second, the content experts were asked to identify the clarity of the wording of the items to
make sure items could not be misinterpreted. DeVellis (1991) suggested that items should be strongly
worded without ambiguity. Relatively mild statements may result in too much respondent agreement
with little variability among the responses. Items that the content experts found redundant,
meaningless, or confusing have been discarded. This process resulted in 16 remaining items
describing strategic leadership behavior (see Table 6.1). The measurement consisted of four items per
quadrant, i.e. Organizational creativity (i.e. Organization Exploration), Business development (i.e.
Environment Exploration), Operational efficiency (i.e. Organization Exploitation) and Client
centricity (i.e. Environment Exploitation) (in line with the strategic leadership model as presented in
chapter five).
TABLE 6-1: STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP BEHAVIORAL ITEMS
6.3 RESULTS
In order to establish the dimensionality of the strategic leadership model, the factor structure was
assessed by using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) (Gorsuch, 1997). Factor analysis represents a
complex array of structure-analyzing procedures used to identify the interrelationships among a large
set of observed variables and then, through data reduction, to group a smaller set of these variables
into factors that have common characteristics (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994). As is common practice,