While Antonakis et al. allocate the contextual school its own place in the
framework of major schools, they do not provide a discrete section of text for it.
It is mentioned rather briefly (2004a: 10) and is described as being strongly
related to the contingency movement. Contextual factors influencing (giving rise
to or inhibiting) leadership are cited as: leader hierarchical level, national culture,
leader-follower gender and organizational characteristics. The authors go on to
note that this perspective goes back several decades and began with
investigations of the role of national culture in leadership. In hospitality studies,
Testa (2002, 2004, 2007 and 2009) has examined the role of nationality and
culture in hospitality-context leadership. Testa found differences in employees’
perceptions of leader behaviour when comparing culturally congruent and
incongruent leader-member dyads. Sections 3.4 and 3.5 below reports Testa’s
work in greater detail.
Antonakis et al. (2004a: 9) describe the new leadership school as emerging
during the 1980s and being pioneered by the work of Bass (1985), Avolio et al.
(1991), Bass (1998), Bass and Avolio (1994) and Hater and Bass (1988).
Encapsulating the transformational, charismatic and visionary traditions of
leadership research, the new leadership paradigm built is based on the
recognition that a theory of leadership which transcends the transactionally-
orientated (reward and punishment based on contractual obligations) is required
to explain and understand follower behaviour that seemed to based on shared
vision and sense of purpose. The transformational dimension drew upon Burns’
(1978) work examining the political, social, and psychological dimensions of
leadership.
Elsewhere, Bryman (1992) suggests transformational and charismatic leadership
approaches emerged to address dynamic organisational environments. That is,
while the situational theories such as those of Fiedler (1967) and Vroom and
Yetton (1973) had identified a variety of significant situational moderator
variables, these situational moderators did not provide any insight into leadership
effectiveness when business and organisational environments were in states of
extended change.
Regardless of which particular forces drove the emergence of charismatic /
transformational leadership theories, these approaches have become among the
most popular in generic leadership research (Lowe and Gardner 2000; Gardner et
al. 2010). In hospitality leadership studies, as this research reports below,