3.2.9 Strategic Leadership Development Inventory (SLDI)
Purpose
This section aims to present various strategic leadership instruments that researchers can draw from for research work of interest, including complete processes of strategic leadership instrument construction, empirical testing, and unique functionalities of the strategic leadership instruments in practices across broader sectors involved.
Description
Drawn on the seminal paper by Hambrick and Mason (1984), this strategic leadership instrument developed by Hester Duursema (2013) goes beyond the leader-follower dyad relationship and accounts for the effectiveness of the interaction of an organization with its environment. This empirical research with broad representative samples over 7 industries demonstrates the internal validity of this instrument. More importantly, it shows that shared strategic leadership is an important indicator of the environment-oriented team effectiveness measure. This instrument has four dimensions: organizational efficiency, creativity, business development, and customer-centricity. A total of 20 items were refined by industry-experienced experts and clustered into 4 dimensions, each dimension with 5 items. Data were collected through a 5-Likert scale from strongly disagree to agree strongly. This instrument was tested through the first exploratory factor analysis and the second confirmatory factor analysis. Internal reliability, multivariate normality, and correlation matrix were ensured. In addition, utilizing this instrument, the difference between strategic leadership and supervisory leadership, such as transformational leadership, was examined. It presented that transformational leadership focuses on the leader and follower dyad level, while strategic leadership aims at the level of organizational system interaction with the environment. Additionally, it claims that the effectiveness of transformational leadership and strategic leadership vary at the top, middle, and low managerial organizational levels. Furthermore, this finding provides relative insight into the conceptual “fit” in the team building of human resource management. This instrument can be applied for testing in broader industries, such as public institutions, business corporations, and the nonprofit sector for a better understanding of how strategic leadership contributes to the subordinates’ job satisfaction at different organizational levels, for example.
In addition, Davies and Davies (2004) shed light on the relationship between organizational abilities and individual characteristics concerning strategic leadership in a school setting. In other words, the authors aim to draw out the distinctive elements of strategic leadership in the leadership repertoires. The model of strategic leadership is shown below (Davies and Davies,2004) in response to the learning-centered leadership in a broader organizational and strategic context to be both sustainable and effective in the long-run.
Furthermore, Drawn on the strategic leadership model (2004), Ismail et al (2018) examine the relationship between strategic leadership and teaching quality mediated by teacher collaboration. The result of reliability for the instruments of strategic leadership as well as the other two is with a high score of Cronbach Alpha range from .84 to .96. The measurement for each variable uses a five-point Likert scale. The research study provides valuable insight into the importance of strategic leadership in creating a culture, environment, and climate on the effectiveness of teaching quality as mediated by teaching collaboration.
Access
The SLDI is accessible via academic journals and research databases, including in the relevant articles listed in the references section. Prior to usage, permission from the authors or copyright holders may be necessary. Contact the authors directly or consult the articles for more information on the availability and permissions.
References
Davies, B. J., & Davies*, B. (2004). Strategic leadership. School leadership & management, 24(1), 29-38.
Duursema, H. (2013). Strategic Leadership: Moving beyond the leader-follower dyad (No. EPS-2013-279-ORG).
Hatfield, B. (1997). Strategic leadership development: An operation domain application [Master’s thesis]. Defense Technical Information Center. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA398012
Ismail, S. N., Kanesan, A. G., & Muhammad, F. (2018). Teacher Collaboration as a Mediator for Strategic Leadership and Teaching Quality. International Journal of Instruction, 11(4), 485-498.
