Self-assessed leadership ratings are broadly applied in the public management literature (Meier & O’Toole, 2011; Knies, Jacobsen & Tummers, 2016), but although non-response is always an issue, we know almost nothing about... [ view full abstract ]
Self-assessed leadership ratings are broadly applied in the public management literature (Meier & O’Toole, 2011; Knies, Jacobsen & Tummers, 2016), but although non-response is always an issue, we know almost nothing about the representativeness of responding leaders. Non-response is an important issue, because selection bias in survey-based leadership studies can threaten the ability to draw causal inference (Angrist & Pischke, 2010; Kreuter, Müller & Trappmann 2010). The general literature on nonresponse in surveys has shown that factors such as interest and motivation increase response rates (Armstrong & Overton, 2005), and it is therefore likely that responding leaders are also more motivated and interested than the typical leader. In particular active leaders, who are motivated and interested in leadership, may be more prone to respond to surveys. In the leadership literature transformational and transactional leadership are described as goal-oriented leadership strategies based on different logics and approaches. Thus, transformational leaders seek to develop, share and sustain a vision with the employees intended to encourage the employees to transcend their self-interest and achieve organizational goals, whereas transactional leaders use contingent rewards and sanctions to create employee self-interest in achieving organizational goals (Jacobsen & Andersen, 2015: 832). We expect that these types of leadership are positively related with survey response, because transformational and transactional have both motivation and interest in exerting active leadership.
We apply a multilevel dataset consisting of survey responses from 140 Danish high school principals and their 3,158 teachers. The dataset allows us to compare employee perceived transformational and transactional leadership among responding and nonresponding leaders and thereby provide new insights on the representativeness of responding leaders. In order to validate our results, we use survey data from 64 leaders and their 464 employees from three German public administrations. Preliminary analyses show that responding leaders are perceived as more transformational and less sanctioning than nonresponding leaders, but there are no significant differences in the use of contingent rewards.
Based on these results, we test if the less intense transformational and less sanctioning leadership behavior of non-responding leaders also results in a lack of performance. Testing performance differences between responding and non-responding leaders is based on exam grade data for the 140 observed Danish high schools. In a preliminary analysis, we do not find significantly lower performance for non-responding leaders.
In terms of methodology, these results call for more attention to the causal inference drawn from studies based on leader self-assessments of leadership, but in terms of leadership they also suggest that leaders who show engagement through participation are also perceived as more active leaders in terms of setting a clear direction for their organization.
