Content area
Full text
Robert J. Alban-Metcalfe: Trinity and All Saints' University College, Leeds, UK
Beverly Alimo-Metcalfe: Nuffield Institute Centre for Leadership Studies, University of Leeds, UK
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Received/Accepted: May 2000 The authors wish to thank the Local Government Management Board (now the Improvement and Development Agency), in particular Carole Barrie, Ian Briggs and Stephanie Goad, and the University of Leeds for co-funding this research.
Introduction
The emergence of the "New Leadership Approach" (Bryman, 1992) in the 1980s represented a paradigm shift from "transactional" methods such as the situational and contingency models of Fiedler (1967), Vroom and Yetton (1973), and Yukl (1989), to the "visionary" (Sashkin, 1988), "charismatic" (Conger and Kanungo, 1988; House 1977), and the "transformational" (e.g. Bass, 1985, 1998a, 1998b, Bass and Avolio, 1994b). All these models, like the majority of leadership publications, have emanated from the wealth of studies by US scholars of managers in US organisations, and have had a major impact on the content of management education and development texts, and on related organisational practices (see Chelmers and Ayman, 1993; Hunt, 1996; Rosenbach and Taylor, 1993; Wright, 1996, for reviews). It is not an exaggeration to state that they have contributed significantly to "the received wisdom" of leadership.
More recently, however, writers in the field of leadership, such as Adler (1983a, 1983b, 1991), Ayman (1993), Smith and Bond (1993), and Triandis (1990, 1993) have questioned the generalisability of US findings to non-US cultures. Indeed, two recent issues of The Leadership Quarterly journal have included articles devoted to this matter (Hunt and Peterson, 1997; Peterson and Hunt, 1997), with Hunt (1999, p. 138) stating recently that: "many scholars outside the USA saw [leadership research] as a virtual US hegemony".
As researchers and consultants in the field of leadership working with organisations in the UK, the issue of generalisabilty was also our main concern and led us to develop a UK leadership questionnaire, the Transform-ational Leadership Questionnaire (Local Government Version) (TLQ-LGV) (Alimo-Metcalfe and Alban-Metcalfe, 1999), which was developed from perceptions of leadership of middle, senior and top managers in local government. In addition, we were also aware of other issues that might affect the validity of the US leadership research for a non-US context.
Leadership and social distance
Bryman (1996) draws attention to the fact that...