The five practices of exemplary leadership model

Running head: LEADERSHIP 1

LEADERSHIP 5

The Kouzes-Posner Model of Leadership Name Academic Institution

The Kouzes-Posner Model of Leadership The Kouzes-Posner Model of Leadership or the “Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership Model” (2017) is based upon five core principles. The first is that of modeling, or the notion that the leader must model the qualities he or she wishes followers to emulate. The second is being willing to share an inspired vision with subordinates and other organizational stakeholders. This is the transformational aspect of leadership that is one component, although not the exclusive component, of the model. The third principle is to challenge the status quo of the current organization and to show a willingness to take risks. Contingent upon this third principle is the fourth, which is to enable others to take action. Teamwork is vitally important and leadership must not operate in a top-down fashion, it means building connections with others. Finally, leaders must, in the words of Kouzes and Posner, inspire the heart, or recognize the contributions that employees make to the organization. Kouzes and Posner’s principles seem sound. They claim that the principles are based upon empirical research, using their Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI). According to the authors, “The LPI was created by developing a set of statements describing various leadership actions and behaviors. These items were derived by recording specific one-sentence descriptions of behaviors” (Posner, 2017, p.3). This type of an inventory is common in psychometric testing. It should be noted that the authors’ did not conduct an intensive literature review of evidence-based leadership before creating the inventory. The inventory was created to support the theory based on the previous work of Kouzes and Posner alone using their Personal-Best Leadership Experience questionnaire. This questionnaire consists only of 38 questions, albeit more open-ended ones than the LPI (Posner 2017). There are only thirty questions on the actual LPI itself graded on a Likert scale from 1-10, which gives relatively limited individual insight. The LPI was extremely broad-based in its administration. Its respondents included physicians, school administrators, individuals in the public sector, and administrators. The exam was submitted to a wide variety of nationalities and the authors claim that there is strong internal reliability on a cross-cultural basis in terms of agreement with the statements. On the other hand, it is questionable if the definitions of the terms used in such a relatively small study mean the same thing in context to people around the world. At minimum, this was not established and again the relatively short nature of the study makes its validity questionable. Similarly, the researchers assert that there were minimal differences between males and females in terms of how they recorded their leadership responses, and that geographical location had little influence. Again, the relatively short, quantitative nature of the LPI could arguably mask important differences between people from different regions who may interpret the definitions in the statements in distinct ways. Simply because a study is widely administered does not necessarily make it accurate. In fact, it could be argued given that leadership needs, personalities, and strengths vary so much between industries, having too much rather than too little data may be equally detrimental. More data is not necessarily mean better data. While in the abstract the five core principles seem to affirm important concepts such as finding a sustaining long-term vision for an organization versus solely focusing on short-term profits and affirming positive contributions of team members, the research to support the principles only appears to be more empirically based and rigorous than other leadership manuals; there is no evidence to suggest that this specific model is superior to others with similar values.