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Transformative leadership, social change, and commitment-an analysis
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Transcript of Transformative leadership, social change, and commitment-an analysis
Transformative leadership, social change,
and commitment: an analysis Michael Chew
Introduction
This paper explores various concepts of transformative leadership in the
theory and operation of a pilot social change project, the Pledge Project. In
particular it critically explores how the transformative concepts of expanded
identification and distributive leadership operate in the project. This is
achieved in two parts - firstly by exploring the broad conceptual background of
the project, then in the second part critically examining the project’s various
operational roles together with their inter-relationships. From this analysis
brief recommendations are developed for deepening the transformational
nature of future projects.
Part A – Background and context
Snapshot: the project and its context
The Pledge Project was designed to provide a mechanism to enable
participants to make individual written commitments to undertake actions to
address climate change. These commitments involved specific, personally
feasible social actions that would address climate change directly or indirectly.
The project was initiated as a response to:
a) The collective lack of political leadership around addressing climate
change at various levels of government;
b) The failure of the recent Copenhagen summit to produce scientifically
meaningful action;
a) The dominant emphasis in public discourse on personal action as the
most appropriate site of action to address climate change (as opposed
to the community or political spheres).1
Because of these factors – namely insufficient action concentrated at the
wrong level - I explicitly framed the pledged actions in terms of social,
community and political influence, defined as one’s cultural footprint2. The
participant’s written pledges committed themselves to take actions that would
increase his or her cultural footprint - expanding their social influence on
others – e.g. taking political action, educating their community, motivating
friends to reduce their ecological footprints, and so forth.
The project operated as follows: a small number of volunteer facilitators
sat at the public project table and verbally engaged passers-by to participate
in the project. This involved inviting them to sit down, introducing them to the
concept, and engaging the participant in a general conversation with the aim
of guiding her/him to commit to a relevant action. The participant then wrote a
brief description of the action on a slip of carbon copy paper to produce two
written pledges. Finally, the participant attached the original pledge to a large
public display board, and kept the copy as a reminder to take the action.
The project took place as part of ‘Create’ program of the 2010
Sustainable Living Festival in Birrarung Marr, Melbourne. This festival has
established itself a key event in Melbourne’s sustainability calendar, and
approaches sustainability in a broad fashion – encompassing educational,
political, consumerist, and creative approaches (Petheram & Johnson 2006).
Despite this wide scope, the vast majority of stalls and events were
predominantly information-based, framing the participant as a generally either
a passive recipient of information or as a predetermined role - for instance as
a potential member or donor of an environmental organisation. As we will
explore in the subsequent sections, the project’s goal of fostering the
1 The author acknowledges that these points are contested; however their discussion is outside the scope of this paper. 2 This term is used in contrast with personal actions, which are designed to reduce one's individual or household’s 'ecological footprint'. The term was first introduced to me during a lecture for an environmental leadership course (J Clarke [Centre for Sustainability Leadership] 2007, Week 6, 15 June).
participants’ own agency represents transformative leadership processes -
which have the potential to transform the participants’ subjectivity to a greater
degree than the approaches listed above. Firstly however it is important to
introduce the core elements of transformative leadership relevant to the
project and its context of social change.
Theoretical background: transformative leadership and social change
Although many of the concepts behind transformative leadership are far from
new, they have only been critically discussed over the last few decades.3
Burns’ (1978) work on the topic is considered seminal (Stone, Russell &
Patterson 2004), arguing that leaders are transformational or transactional –
the former appealing to the follower’s higher moral values and the latter
appealing to the follower’s self-interest through systems of rewards and
punishments. Since then, the definition of transformational leadership has
been widely researched and contested in academic and management
literature (Brown & Treviño 2006, Fry 2003). Two perspectives that are useful
in exploring the Pledge Project will now be discussed.
Firstly, according to Bass, transformational leadership occurs when
leaders ‘…generate awareness and acceptance of the purposes and mission
of the group, and when they stir their employees to look beyond their own
self-interest for the good of the group’ (Bass 1990:21). Namely, it is a process
for expanding a person’s concerns from self-centred to group-centred,
appealing to the follower’s higher moral values – that of expanded
identification. The second perspective can be broadly described as
distributed leadership. As Timperley writes, ‘distributed leadership is not the
same as dividing task responsibilities among individuals… but rather it
comprises dynamic interactions between multiple leaders and followers’
(Timperley 2005:396). While this concept of distributive leadership has a
literature of its own (National College for School Leadership 2003), and its
3 An age old example is Lao Tzu’s famous quote, ‘The wicked leader is he whom the people revile. The good leader is he whom the people revere. The great leader is he of whom the people say, "We did it ourselves." ‘ (Lao Tzu, cited in Senge 1990:328).
relationship to transformative leadership is complex and is still being
debated,4 this paper draws upon the concept for its transformative connective
and emergent processes. While other transformative concepts are referred to
throughout the paper, these two perspectives form the general basis
underpinning the project’s operation.
A key point to note here is that the project takes place in a social
change context, rather than in an organisational context - where much of the
transformative leadership literature is focused. The latter theories intersect
with research on social and behaviour change in complex ways; it is unwise to
assume that one can be applied uncritically to the other. Frequently
behaviour change theory and practice relies on a mix of transformative and
transactional leadership styles to achieve specific ends - for instance using
appeals to an individual’s intrinsic values (transformative), while also relying
on incentives (transactional) to encourage specific behaviour change (De
Young 1993).
However there are two clear differences between the project’s function
and this kind of model behaviour change program. Firstly, instead of
encouraging a personal behaviour change - such as reducing energy one’s
usage, the project instead appeals to the participant to make change on a
broader level, relying on an expanded identification beyond personal actions.5
Secondly, instead of a specific action – such as writing to one’s local
representative – the project asks the participant to reflect on his or her life,
then decide on an action themselves. These differences are reflective of the
transformative processes in the participant-facilitator interactions, which are
discussed in more detail later in the paper.
A final component of the project’s theoretical context is its form – that
of a personal, written commitment. This is by no means unique, having been
studied extensively as a means to generate behaviour change (De Young
1993). However, on a theoretical level, the pledge mechanism is
transformative according to the earlier definition – as making a commitment
4 For the purposes of this paper we will take Timperley’s view, regarding it as a subset of transformative leadership (Timperley 2003). 5 It is important to note that a minority of pledges described personal actions, rather than community actions – this issue is noted at the conclusion of the paper as a topic for further research.
can create a shift in the participant’s internal attitudes - not just their external
behaviour. For instance, Pardini and Katzev, when reflecting upon why their
commitment intervention produced durable change, suggested that the
participants may have found ‘…their own reasons for recycling, to begin to
even like doing so, and, as a result, to continue to perform these behaviors on
their own’ (Pardini & Katzev, cited in De Young 1993:499). Thus pledges can
decouple behaviour change from existing transactional, reward-based
incentives, causing the locus of change to moved to the internal,
transformative, value-based level.
Part B – Project Analysis
Transformative Leadership in action
We shift now from the general discussion of the project’s transformative
processes to explore its specific operations and the extent to which
transformative leadership is expressed through various operational roles.
These include the roles of project designer, project manager, facilitators, and
participants.
Participant 1 Participant 2 Participant 3
Facilitator 1 Facilitator 2 Facilitator 3
Project Manager
Pedestrian traffic flow
This figure shows the operational relationships discussed in Part B
Project designer
I had three roles: project designer, manager, and facilitator (during the
project’s operation). As project designer I conceived the vision and operation
of the project. It was a largely my idea, though I took input from several
friends in the design process. However, I consciously chose not to develop
this vision collectively, thereby choosing a non-transformative approach to this
generative stage6. This was because of time constraints, and a concern that
involving others at that stage would alter the developed project vision. Here I
was operating more inline with heroic leadership – for instance having a
strong personal vision that needed to be protected (Fletcher 2004). This was
the trade-off: I got a pilot project off the ground nimbly in limited time, but
without the perhaps stronger base of a slow-moving organising group with a
collectively generated vision. On reflection, this illustrates that genuine post-
heroic transformational leadership inevitably takes more time if applied
consistently at all project stages; and this time may not be available.
Project management and cooperative facilitation dynamics
During the project’s operation, my role shifted to project manager -
coordinating and briefing volunteers to act as facilitators. This role was a
complex interplay of transformative and non-transformative processes.
The actual structure of coordination (primarily recruiting, briefing and
timetabling facilitators) was managerial rather than leadership based, and
specific outcome of the vision process described above.7 However the
process in which it operated displayed transformative qualities. During the
project there were many times when I could not be present at the project stall,
leaving after meeting and briefing volunteer facilitators. I encouraged the
facilitators to perform not only the content of their roles (engaging with
participants), but also some of the coordination role itself independently of
myself and collaboratively with other facilitators. For instance, the facilitators 6 See Lyman (2005) for a discussion on the relationship between collective visioning and transformative leadership. 7 An interesting point to note here is Leithwood and Jantzi’s incorporation of these processes into their model of transformational leadership, they write, ‘Most models of transformational leadership are flawed by their under representation of transactional practices (which we interpret to be “managerial” in nature)’ (Leithwood & Jantzi 1999:454).
found replacements for themselves if they had to leave the stall, briefed new
facilitators, and juggled the varied incoming streams of participants. These
leadership processes can be read as context dependent transformative
distributive process, as described in Part A. As Copland writes, ‘Decisions
about who leads and who follows are dictated by the task or problem
situation, not necessarily by where one sits in the hierarchy’ (Copland cited in
Timperley 2005:396). By handling these meta-tasks as well as their own
tasks, the facilitators expand their concerns from just their own duties to the
project broader operation and goals, joining with the other key concept of the
earlier definition of transformative leadership – expanded identification. As
Lyman wrote, ‘Transformational leadership, however, is still about getting
others to do what you want them to do’ (Lyman 2005:153) – what is important
here is how others are actually engaged to do this.
We now turn to examine these relationships in detail using a more
specific theory of distributive transformative leadership - the complexity
leadership theory that Uhl-Bien, Marion and McKelvey (2007) develop. Their
theory is based on how leadership processes develop in Complex Adaptive
Systems (CAS) - ‘neural-like networks of interacting, interdependent agents
who are bonded in a cooperative dynamic by common goal, outlook, need,
etc’ (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey 2007:299). The dynamic functioning of the
facilitators in the Pledge Project can be read as a basic CAS – with its shared
goals of engaging participants as individuals while simultaneously self-
monitoring and managing participant demand as a whole. According to the
theory, these actions could be read as an example of adaptive leadership –
‘adaptive, creative, and learning actions that emerge from the interactions of
CAS as they strive to adjust to tension’ (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey
2007:305). The tension in this context was the varied flow of participants and
their inter-subjective interactions, as well as physical perturbations, such as
wind or shifting sunlight. I participated in this system alongside the others –
however as the recognised manager, my presence had a dampening effect on
the network dynamics. Facilitators tended to defer to me in problem solving,
which they would have probably addressed themselves.8 This shows how the
mere presence of administrative leadership – recognised positional leaders –
affects the emergent dynamic of the system, skewing it towards traditional
non-transformational leader-follower relations.
Facilitator-Participant dynamics
The interaction at the core of the project was between the facilitators and the
participants themselves. Several transformative leadership processes were
crucial here, affecting the quality, depth and transformative potential of these
interactions, which subsequently had a direct effect on the pledges made.
Here, it is important to note two key limitations in the facilitator-
participant dynamics. Firstly, due to the festival context - with its rapid flows
of people – participant-facilitator interaction time was constrained – generally
less than ten minutes per participant. Intuition suggests that a short duration
would limit the effective transformative processes in this interaction – a view
corroborated by Krishnan (2006).9 Secondly, although participants’ emails
were recorded after pledging, no follow up contact was made with them. This
limited the ability to gain evaluative information about the success rate of
pledge follow-through, and the ability to remind, support, or re-inspire
participants after the project finished.
Returning to the complexity leadership analysis of the Pledge Project,
we examine how adaptive leadership operates as part of facilitator-participant
interactions. In these interactions the facilitators used a range of techniques to
guide the participant towards choosing an action to pledge. Some relied
mainly on the example action sheets provided10, which tended to shift the
participant into a more passive subject position, often causing participants to
pledge arbitrarily or politely leave.11 The more successful facilitators engaged
8 It is important to note that I was only able to infer this phenomena second-hand through knowledge of various facilitator’s styles and observation – it is difficult to measure accurately. 9 It is of interest that the above study also infers that the affective subset of transformative leadership outcomes - attachment and affective commitment to organization - were unaffected by duration. This implies the short interaction may still be effective as an initial ‘spark’ or inspiration to explore the ideas project’s ideas. 10 These contained compiled lists of example actions and were intended to jog the participant’s mind and provide a backup if they could not think of an action themselves. 11 These observations were generalisations from my own experience as a facilitator and observing other facilitators techniques, and do not capture the wide range of interactions
the participants as thinking subjects, drawing out the person’s concerns
around climate change, their interests in action, and encouraging them to
arrive at their own decisions about what actions to take. This dynamic
interplay allowed adaptive leadership to emerge as a product of the
interactions of facilitator and participant. These dialogues created a fertile
space for new realisations to occur – for instance the aha moment, ‘when
interdependent individuals who are debating conflicting perceptions of a given
issue suddenly, and perhaps simultaneously, generate a new understanding
of that issue’ (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey 2007:307). Effectively the
facilitator and participant co-create the pledged action together. Though the
conversations were very rarely directly oppositional as implied above, the
actual process of encouraging a participant to choose an action tended to
pose some degree of challenge, indirectly or directly, as it required the
participant to step outside her/his assumptions about social change, it is the
‘…process of seeing beyond original assumptions to something not bounded
by those assumptions’. Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvey 2007:307). This
complexity leadership analysis articulates in more detail the general
transformative leadership concepts outlined at the beginning.
Expanded Identification
The process of encouraging the participant to see beyond her own
assumptions about undertaking social action is another key transformational
process operating in the Pledge Project – that of expanded identification. This
forms the conceptual basis for the project’s “ask” of participants, which was to
expand their cultural footprint. This process can be analysed on two levels –
the broad and the specific.
On the broad level, this expanded sense of self relates back to Bass’
definition of transformative leadership quoted earlier – ‘to look beyond their
own self-interest for the good of the group’ (Bass 1990:21). In the project’s
context the group is not a specifically defined structure, but is rather
delineated by what it is not (an individual). It is instructive here to draw upon
O’Sullivan’s (2004) concept of the minimal and the ecological self. The former displayed. Formalised evaluative methods would lead to more accurate results and more faithful analysis.
represents the modernist, isolated self that is alienated from authentic
connections with others and the planet, while the latter is the reverse – the
self that is fundamentally interconnected with successively wider circles of
identifications- family, community, nation, earth, and universe. Thus the
Pledge Project asked the participant to look beyond their minimal self to take
broader action centred on their wider circles of identification.
This perspective raises a question – if successively wider identification
reconnects the minimal self, is there a similar expectation of an ideal
trajectory of expansiveness implicit in the project? That is, does it imply that
successive pledges should be bolder and more far-reaching? This question is
difficult to answer – my personal view is that it does imply this; however,
although it may be appropriate for such a project to impose a particular
trajectory for pledges made in an organisational context, it does not suite the
social change context, where a diversity of trajectories, for a diversity of
participants, is required for transformative change.
Finally, we address how this expanded identification affects the
participant’s self-image. If the facilitator-participant engagement has been
successful, and the participant expands his/her identification, then their self-
image simultaneously shifts in the direction of embed the other – what was
formally an outer circle of identification. This is characteristic of an altruistic
relationship, which is ultimately the context in which participants make
pledges. Thus ‘..altruism brings in the dimension of “others” into leader’s
definition of self’ (Singh & Krishnam 2008:264). This can in turn produce
other transformations in the participant’s self-image – for example, from
empirically focused to more community focused, or from a member/donor self-
image to that of an independent change-agent.
Conclusions, recommendations and further research
We have seen through these critical explorations that transformative
leadership processes are active in both the broad conceptual positioning of
the Pledge Project, as well as in the specific interpersonal processes
occurring between the various project roles. While these processes were
subject to various practical constraints and limitations, they essentially serve
to structurally underpin the project’s aims of social change. These
transformative aims are enacted both in the project’s organisation and
delivery – the former empowering the facilitators to act autonomously and
collaboratively, and the latter expanding the participants’ circle of awareness
and action.
It is, however, important to remain critical and realistic in our
explorations. The pilot project’s two most serious shortcomings were the lack
of time spent on individual participant interactions – limiting the project’s
transformative affect, and lack of follow-up with participants – limiting ability to
follow through and support actions. Future projects should take steps to
address these two concerns – which would allow for a greater realisation of
the transformative leadership processes inherent in the pilot. Further research
could also address analyses not included in this paper due to space
constraints – such the transformative basis of the actual pledges themselves,
their relative success or failure, and the types of participants who were
engaged.
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Appendix 1 – Project Documentation Further documentation can be found at: http://thepledgeproject.blogspot.com