Psychodynamic Approach To Leadership

Abstract

This research paper reports on development and validation of an instrument for use in psychodynamics of educational leadership exploring the relationship between positive and negative leaders’ emotions and their impact on their institutional functioning at the goal orientation, human relations and decision making approaches. The paper describes the process of instrument development from an adopted to a constructed one. The paper describes the use of Delphi’s technique using a team of local and international subject matter experts in developing a measure of psychodynamics approach in educational leadership and use of item analysis technique to validate the resulting instrument. The data was obtained from a cyclical process whereby

The psychodynamic approach places emphasis on leaders obtaining insights into their personality characteristics and understanding the responses of colleagues based on their personalities. Leaders also encourage colleagues to gain insights into their own personalities so that they learn to understand their reactions to the leader and others. Important concepts in psychodynamic approach to leadership include family origin, individuation, dependence and independence, repression and shadow self. The approach proposes that leaders are more effective when they have an insight into their own psychological makeup and understand the psychological makeup of their colleagues (Woolfook, 2009). This leads to an important aspect of leadership that emphasizes past experiences, the unconsciousness, emotions, self-understanding and personality types as well as the relationship between the leaders and colleagues and the emotional transaction and communication between and among people (Zalzenik, 2008). This brings into focus one important function of a leader which is to facilitate the procedures of having individuals obtaining insight and determining their individual needs and emotional reaction patterns to

Voronov and Vince (2012) and Thiel, Connelly, and Griffith (2012) investigated some of the potential beneficial consequences of leaders’ positive emotions, it is likely that a diversity of emotions influences leadership effectiveness. Negative emotions foster systematic and careful information processing (Sadri, Weber, & Gentry, 2011; Schmidt & Datnow, 2005) and may be advantageous when leaders are dealing with complex problems in which errors carry high risk. As another example, relatively intense negative emotions may appropriately redirect a leader’s attention to an issue in need within the institution (Patzelt & Shepherd, 2011). Leaders who experience negative emotions frequently may have a difficult time building good relationships with followers and engendering their trust (Jones & George, 2008). Similarly, a leader who frequently experiences positive emotions on the job may fail to notice and attend to performance shortfalls that are less than apparent (Reetz, Moderner, Berlin, Conference, & Studies, 2012). Therefore, the inquiry into the role of emotions in leadership is not bent on determining the right or effective emotions that facilitate leadership effectiveness (Mehr & Shah, 2009). Leaders are obviously human beings with the full range of emotions potentially available to them and both positive and negative emotions serve numerous functions in people’s lives as well as at times be the cause of human dysfunction