Article review on role of stewardship in leadership by Richard Waters

Article review on role of stewardship in leadership by Richard Waters

The first article that was used is on the role of stewardship in leadership by Richard Waters. This author concentrated on the use of contingency theory of leadership in relationship cultivation. Different categories of public relations make use of relationship-building tactics in their public relations programs differently. There are different theories that have been developed to explain the correspondences of the leaders. The researcher conducted a survey on public relations practitioners where a sample of 539 practitioners participated. Like any other research, the researcher was granted permission by the Public Relations Society of America since their members were the population of interest for the study, but unfortunately, the permission was not granted at the national level. The researcher was required to call the individual chapter leadership in which 11 out of 20 chapters agreed to participate.

The researcher found out that the situations that are usually related to organizational relationship issues make the public relations practitioners to be oriented as leaders. The research focused on those who are oriented, the neutral groups, and those who are not oriented. It was revealed that the oriented group who .carried out public relations programming formed the majority followed by the neutral group. After making a comparison between the public relations scholarship and the contingency theory of leadership, it was revealed that the two were greatly associated. The three groups were also tested for stewardship, and the researcher found out that in any efforts that the three groups made, they usually incorporated some form of stewardship. It was clear from this study that the contingency perspective of leadership helped in describing and predicting public relations. The researcher confirmed the suppositions made by previous studies that those who have strong perceptions of themselves usually make strong leaders.

The second article that was used is titled “Toward a Contingency Model of Leadership and Psychological Empowerment,” which was aimed at accessing when self-leadership should be encouraged. The researcher capitalized on some essential aspects of leadership, which include psychological empowerment and self-leadership. The researcher revealed that psychological empowerment refers to a multi-dimensional motivational construct with four distinct constructs. Self-leadership, on the other hand, concentrates on how people in an organization can influence themselves. The researcher tried some of the theories that are associated with the self-leadership concept, which include self-management theory, self-control theory, and intrinsic motivation theory. Finally, the researcher found out that self-leadership formed part of psychological empowerment. The researcher used a qualitative approach in answering the research question as well as conducting a meta-analysis on the past studies that were conducted on the same subject.

The researcher revealed that implementing any of the leadership approaches that were discussed could lead to four major predictable outcomes. One of such predictable measures includes the degree of follower commitment. Most people may think that follower commitment entails the efforts made by an employee in ensuring an increased performance of an organization. However, the researchers revealed that it was beyond this. Follower commitment combined both behavioral compliance and affective commitment. The second predictable outcome was follower dependence, which normally results from leadership empowerment.  The follower creativity and innovation is another predictive outcome that is linked to the employees development of ideas. The last predictable outcome, as mentioned by the researcher, was the psychological empowerment.

Critique of the articles

The researcher of this study made efforts to create a link between the public relations scholarship and the contingency theory of leadership. There are several past studies that have been conducted on this issue, and the study revealed that the results from this study, to some extent, were almost similar to that from other similar studies. One of the strengths of this method is the method that was used in selecting participants. To ensure validity, reliability, and accuracy of the study, the use of probabilistic methods to select the sample size is essential. The researcher used simple random sampling to select the sample and tried all means possible to ensure that the sample size was relatively large.

However, there were a number of issues that might have affected the outcome. The researcher used 11 out of the 20 chapters that he intended to include in the survey. This is because some of the chapters declined to take part in the study. Despite the efforts made by the researcher to use all the registered practitioners at the national level, the efforts did not bear fruits. This means that the results that were obtained were to be applied to the 11 chapters that took part in the survey and not all the 20 chapters as it was initially planned. On the other hand, the response rate that was experienced was questionable. The researcher mentions that out of the 1635 surveys that were mailed, only 539 were returned. A response rate of 32.9% was too low for the study. The researcher should check and come out with the reasons that made most of the respondents not to take part in the survey to help for future similar surveys.

In the second article, the researchers made efforts to find the relationship between self-leadership and psychological empowerment. These were some of the essential aspects of this research since the whole research was based on these concepts. Indeed, the two are closely associated, and this has been approved by other past studies that were conducted. Some of the predictable outcomes that were mentioned in this study have been revealed by other researchers who conducted similar studies. However, it is mentioned in the paper that there were more than four predictable outcomes, but the researchers chose to discuss only four. The reasons that made the researchers leave other possible outcomes out of this research discussion were not revealed.

The study also concentrated much on other qualitative and quantitative studies that had been conducted by other researchers on different aspects that are related to self-leadership. Some of these studies normally have problems that may include the selection of participants and the sample size that was used in conducting the research. Although some of such limitations may not be determined directly from this study, there is a possibility that such issues existed. Such inherent problems that are associated with the studies that the authors of this paper used may affect the accuracy, credibility, and reliability of this study. It is essential that future studies be conducted based on primary data that is collected from the population of interest to ensure that the research accuracy, efficacy, reliability, and credibility are all taken into consideration. The researcher should also take some time to decide on the best method, either qualitative or quantitative, that will be used in delivering the desired results.