The study of leadership is one of those disciplines that invoke fierce debate
among scholars and at the centre of the leadership debate lies the many
approaches to the discipline that are employed by scholars and these
approaches have led to different definitions of the discipline such as the trait
theory of leadership, the behavioural theory of leadership and the contingent
theory of leadership.
This study was undertaken for two main reasons. Firstly, to investigate the
leadership behaviour of deputy directors of the Department of Agriculture
and secondly, to establish how those leadership behaviour of deputy
directors impacted on the employee morale of their subordinates. The study
was conducted within the public administration environment and it was
conducted using the leadership behaviour theory whose main assumption is
that leadership is a relationship between the leader and the followers and as
such, the behaviour of the leader has direct impact on the morale of the
followers.
The key leadership behaviour that were used for the study came from the
Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) survey instrument that was developed
by Kouzes and Posner (2002) and five key factors were identified as central
to the study of leadership behaviour for the purpose of this study. Firstly,
leaders are expected to act exemplary (model the way) by ensuring that what
they say is what they do. Secondly, leaders are expected to inspire a shared
vision so that their followers are able to assimilate the vision being pursued.
Thirdly, leaders are expected to challenge the existing institutional processes
and systems so that all resources can be directed towards the realisation of
the new vision. Fourthly, leaders are expected to enable their followers to act
by creating an environment that is conducive to effective service delivery
and fifthly, leaders are expected to encourage their followers to endure
where challenges seem overwhelming so that followers should not be
discouraged and give up.
Since the study was conducted within the public administration
environment, its main purpose was to discover how frequently do deputy
directors engage in those five factors. The study yielded mixed results where
in some of the factors, deputy directors engaged frequently whereas in the
other factors, they had infrequent engagement. The participants to this study
were grouped into three categories: deputy directors (as leaders being
evaluated), and directors and subordinates (as observers). The study used the
Likert scale where the data was interpreted by means of graphs. / Public Administration and Management
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/4965 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Myeni, Amon |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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