Expectations of Grassroots Community Leadership in Times of Normality and Crisis

Abstract

The article compares the preferences of community members for the transformational and transactional leadership styles of grassroots leaders at times of normality with those during a crisis. A structured questionnaire was administered to members of a community that experienced security crises on the Lebanese border of Israel before the 2006 Lebanon War. It reveals differences in the dominance of preferred leadership styles depending on the type of situation -normality or crisis. The article discusses these differences, compares the findings with those of other studies and considers their practical implications.

Leadership in a time of financial crisis: what do we want from our leaders?

“…agentic or communal/transactional or transformational) is ideal across crisis contexts. To add to this complexity, our findings in conjunction with others (Boehm et al, 2010;Wooten and James, 2008), suggest that our standard leadership measures (MLQ), may not be able to capture effective leadership in an organizational crisis context. Our findings support the notion that evaluations of a good leader vary by situation (Lord et al, 1984(Lord et al, , 2001) and our results take this a step further to suggest that standard leadership measures may not be effective in measuring and capturing leadership across contexts (e.g.…”

“…Their findings indicate that charismatic leadership is linked to organizational performance under conditions of uncertainty but not under conditions of certainty. In addition, one study of communities in crisis suggests that members had greater expectations of both transformational and transactional leadership during times of crisis vs non-crisis (Boehm et al, 2010). The preference for transformational leadership was attributed mainly to a greater preference for the idealized influence subscale and a communicative subscale which the authors included in their instrument (Koene et al, 2002).…”

Crisis leadership styles—Bligh versus Gillard: a content analysis of Twitter posts on the Queensland floods

“…The view that transformational leadership may be used separately from, or in conjunction with, transactional leadership has become the most commonly held position among leadership researchers (e.g. Wofford and Goodwin, ; Boehm et al ., ). The key dimensions of transformational leadership have been characterised as four Is: idealised influence (more commonly termed charisma), inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualised consideration (Avolio et al ., ; Humphreys, ).…”

“…Over the past decade, scholars in the field have emphasised the contingent nature of leadership (e.g. Shamir and Howell, ; Osborn et al ., ; Humphreys, ; Boehm et al ., ). Osborn et al .…”

“…Boehm et al . () investigated the preferences of communities living near the Israeli/Lebanese border, who experienced recurring security crises prior to the war of 2006. Respondents were asked whether they preferred grass roots community leaders to display transformational or transactional leadership characteristics in times of crisis versus periods of normality.…”