Methodologies of Leadership Research

The idea of a research “methodology,” including a leadership research methodology, refers to a broad strategy of social inquiry. In the absence of universal scholarly agreement on a preferred methodology within the social sciences and humanities, there exists a plurality of contending methodological approaches. These different methodologies are anchored in sets of assumptions about ontology (i.e., what is real, what is the nature of reality and what are its constituent properties?) and epistemology (i.e., what is knowledge, what can be known and how can it be known?). While ontological and epistemological questions and issues are normally the subject matter of ongoing scholarly debate among philosophers, [Page 996]especially in the philosophy of science, these kinds of assumptions are also espoused by social theorists with varying degrees of theoretical explicitness, coherence, and logical consistency in the framing of their research. In this regard, a commitment to a particular combination of ontological and epistemological assumptions may inform a researcher's conceptualization, design of research, instrumentation, process of investigation, data analysis and interpretation, and theorizing of a range of social problems and phenomena. When taken together, in the case of individual researchers, these underpinning claims about research and inquiry are known as a scholarly outlook, worldview, or theory of the world. In the case of sets of scholars of like mind or commensurable outlooks, who either position themselves contiguously or are so positioned by their peers, these jointly adhered to methodological claims are generally referred to as a theoretical perspective, standpoint, school of thought, or, most recently, a paradigm.

Disputation about methodology, driven for the most part by conflicting ontologies and epistemologies, has been a prominent feature of scholarly writing across the social sciences over the past two to three decades. These disputes, sometimes labeled “the paradigm wars,” have encompassed a breadth and depth of theoretical issues. Two especially, which are dealt with in more detail below, have concerned the relationship between language and those features of reality which a particular body of discourse purports to represent, along with the question of the legitimacy of the unit of analysis and nomination of the methods appropriate to the procurement of unit-level data (i.e., data about a phenomenon). Both issues are significant for advancing understanding of the phenomenon of leadership. However, compared with their peers in the intellectual realms most closely associated with leadership, administrative, and managerial studies—where, for instance, entire issues of the leading refereed journals have been devoted to discussions of alternative inquiry modes (e.g., Van Maanen 1979; Fineman & Mangham 1983)—leadership scholars have, for the most part, accorded them only sporadic attention. With some exceptions (e.g., Alvesson & Sveningsson 2003), leadership researchers have mostly confined themselves to ascertaining what can be known about leaders and leadership, and to alternative ways of synthesizing an accumulating knowledge base (compare Bass 1990 and Hunt 1991), rather than questioning the aspects of the veracity and validity of that knowledge. That is, leadership commentators have given pragmatic voice to a predilection for “useable” knowledge, rather than according priority to asking critical questions about the status and justification for leadership knowledge. In doing so, they can be seen as “taking,” as opposed to “making,” problems. To “take” a problem or phenomenon means to accept its meaning at face value or as it stands, whereas as to “make” it is to question its status and meaning. This characteristic of taking for granted the selfevident existence of “leadership,” rather than querying the label and construing the status of the phenomenon as problematic, has resulted in a domain of inquiry typified by a mainstream research emphasis on empirical studies of leadership behavior (i.e., various measurements of its presumed incidence and frequency) which coexists with a body of popular, normative leadership literature mostly intended by its authors to engineer desired behavioral changes among practitioners.

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