: Writing the post script section will add 2 pages (600 words), double spaced, not including the title page and reference page.

LACK OF EFFECTIVE LEADERSHIP TRAINING LEADS TO POOR DECISION MAKING

Richard Hairston

GM 599-01 Applied Research Project

5/22//2018

Professor

Craig McCoy

Introduction

Leadership involves influencing other people to achieve organization goals. Nowadays the leadership styles and management practices adopted by any organization’s leaders has been paramount in determining the direction of the organization and influencing the success factors of the organization. Leadership is one of the key determinants of the success level of any organization. It therefore plays an essential role at the heart of the decision-making process influencing the styles applied and the effectiveness of the process. The manner and approach used in providing directions, delegating roles, implementing decisions and motivating staff influence the organization’s culture and affect the performance of the organizations.

The impact of the styles of leadership is felt both in small and large organizations. The level of participation and involvement of employees and other important stakeholders influences the results achieved in the organization and defines the direction of the organization towards its objectives.

Leaders are responsible for making decisions in the organization. They should do this under organized structures and process that are defined and laid out. The process adopted and structuring of the process of decision making impacts customer satisfaction, execution and the general effectiveness of the organization. Management should decide on what levels decision making takes place, how much input from other stakeholders is required and lay out a concrete roll out and implementation plan that defines the timelines and level of employee participation (Karina Nielsen, 2011). It is therefore important to carry out research linking leadership and organization management

The purpose of this research is to investigate various leadership styles that may have a negative effect on the decision-making process within educational organizations. This research will add on to previous research focusing on management practices and their impact on organization but will provide a unique perspective. It will also examine on how it impacts of styles of leadership trickles down to the employees influencing the execution process of a decision and generating measurable impacts on the recipients of the decision, in this case, the students.

Statement of the problem

Many schools lack effective leadership training in decision-making leading to poor institution management, success, and productivity. This research focusses on a school setting by comparing the management and leadership styles adopted and determining the success by focusing on the success indicators such as performance, employees’ satisfaction and discipline of the students. Great schools do not exist apart from great leaders. Many schools and education facilities face challenges of settling on the best administrative structures, bureaucratic systems and determining the appropriate levels of leniency and strictness in engagements with staff and students all the same. The complex nature of a school setting that facilitates close daily interaction between the business, its leaders, employees and clients (students) calls for the need of a system of leadership and decision making that caters for all involved stakeholders while taking into consideration the diverse and dynamic characteristics of the decision recipients.

Research in this area of study has been conducted focusing on the correlation that exists between different school variables and the performance of these institutions (Hanushek, 1997). Among these variables are recourses, teacher qualifications, diversity, racial tolerance and parental contribution (Melvin V.Borland, 1992) (Erick, 1981) (Darrow, 2003). These reports have established the importance of assessing these variables together, as alone; they barely amount to an influence over the institution. However, the case of leadership is quite different. The relationship between a principal, the teachers is a heavy determinant on its own and has even more significance and influence on the school’s performance when assessed in conjunction with the trickle-down impact of the relationship between the staff(teachers) and students (Price, 2011). These relationships are determined by the management styles applied, whether democratic, inclusive, dictatorial, overly bureaucratic etc. (Garyl Yukl, 2009).

Intended Audience

This research will be of great help to prospective organization leaders; particularly, those involved in educational institutions who seek practical guidance in determining the level of leadership, structuring, hierarchy establishments and delegation levels to use in their organizations. By doing this, will produce a work culture that is not too soft to allow misdemeanor and yet is not too bureaucratic to create fear and suppress or inhibit employee and other stakeholder’s contributions. It will help define relationships between leadership and various stakeholders while defining limits and codes of engagement which should be established to govern engagements and avoid overstepping beyond mandated levels (Kark, 2012). This research would find audience among both leaders and employees in all organization types as the general concepts and findings underlined by this research have a broader scope of application and can be adapted to any organization seeking to use the recommendations and suggestions of this research to evaluate its leadership and influence necessary changes.

Value to the audience

The reader of this research is bound to benefit from the widely researched empirical results that this research will arrived at. One will be able to access practical approaches where effective organizational leadership styles have been used to solve organization problems leading to desired outcomes. Besides this, this research shall instill in the reader great knowledge of organizational structures and levels of leadership expound on their appropriateness and reveal as experienced by the researcher first-hand, the appropriateness of each management leadership style contingent to the different environments and needs of the organization. A reader is able to acquire some of the most important leadership qualities and management guidelines which will make him/her suitable to manage an actual organization. Also, since this research aims to determine the relationship between leadership and decision making, the reader is likely to likely to learn the importance of applying specific leadership and management styles to make a specific decision.

Meta-analysis Methodology

Meta-analysis methodology provides a qualitative analysis of different resources that have used first-hand data or data derived from other sources to develop a list if various hypotheses which are related to the main topic of research. Meta-analysis method provides a comprehensive qualitative analysis of articles and other publications that focus on the value of training leaders in ensuring effective sound decision making in schools. Most importantly, it gets to examine the history of leadership styles and how it has been used in the corporate world over the past decades, its trends, and the effect it has on organization success or failure. The selection of different resources and generation of this methodology was based on thematic meta-synthesis.

The method held identify the resources that identify research gaps on the leadership and decision making and leadership training. It offers first-hand data-based findings that reveal the actual contribution of training on leadership and decision-making process in schools. This method was used by identifying key words “leadership training,” “school leadership and management,” and “decision making” and searching them through engines. Only relevant articles within five years were selected and used in order to achieve the research objective. Basic fundamental information concerning the history of organizational leadership, theories of leadership, and importance of corporate leadership and management was provided by the articles, A study on the impact of leadership styles on employee motivation and commitment by Chowdhury and Workplace Intimacy in Leader-Follower Relationships by Kark. According to these articles, there are different types of employee motivation which can be used to enhance employee commitment in different workplaces. One of these methods is through employee retention in the corporate sector (Chowdhury, 2014). This is considered important because giving employees a sense of job security works a long way in developing their trust for the organization which earns a competitive advantage in the respective industry. Even though these resources focus on specific organizations, it was evident that the same leadership concepts and approaches apply to leadership in schools.

Brief Review of the Literature

Review of the literature is the study of how different organizations or authors put into practice different leadership and management styles in enhancing effective sound decision making. It is important to review these styles in other organizations so as to help affected organization, in this case, education sector, adopt an effective style by fixing the weaknesses evident from the reviewed organizations. This would help an education sector avoid common challenges resulting as a result of formulating new leadership and management styles. Also, it reduces the cost of formulating styles.

Having an overview of the general corporate world is important so as to depict possible differences between corporate leadership and leadership in a school. However, the difference between the management and leadership styles used in these two levels is negligible. The success of the educational processes is dependent on the role played by the school administrators. According to Melvin and Roy, most administrators find it challenging to satisfy the large educational markets; because of the variations in market demands and challenges arising from leadership and management techniques used in making decisions, which lead to the decline of students’ academic performances. Leadership and management styles are highly associated with individual traits making it hard to have uniform decisions in all sectors of education as it involves different management leaders. Each decision made has an impact on the academic performance of the students and therefore different academic institutions are likely to achieve different performance depending on the quality of their management team.

Having a central management level in the education sector will help institutions rely on uniform decisions. It is easy to manage academic performance using this style as it involves only one leadership and management styles from on one top management team.

In a research on the Jacob et al. (2014b) on the Training needs and supports for evidence-based decision making among the public health workforce, institutional leadership is paramount in their success and productiveness. The author states that decision making in leadership impact greatly on the institutions' resources and productivity. This is important in the formulation of functional policies that will help sound decision making in schools. Jacob et al. (2014b), suggests that leaders should critically evaluate situations at hand before making any decision.

Training helps individuals be able to be equipped with skills and knowledge that will enable them to do so. Therefore, training of leaders makes the institution to be equipped for sound functional decision making. One should consider using training techniques that are in line with the objective and effective towards achieving those objectives. This will improve the image of the institutions and foster their success and goals achievement. Training makes the trainee understand the models in decision making and the structure and hierarchies that are important in decision making for efficient management of clients in schools.

According to Ejimabo (2015), many factors influenced decision making, a key to them being individual competence. According to the author, competent leadership is likely to drive an organization towards achieving the defined success compared to non-competent leaders. Competent leaders have been known to be charismatic, transformational and transactional in their leadership. This makes use of the combination of both the environment and employee characteristics which makes a problem-solving in a particular situation of productivity to be amicable and sound.

It is important to have competent leaders in the education sector as it requires more than leadership skills to come up an effective sound decision that can drive towards improving the academic performance of the students. For example, education sector aims at expanding the mind of a student which requires decisions that can influence the mind unlike for the business organization where individuals apply skills to generate something.

According to Munn (2017), involving employees in the decision-making process is a great move in an organization towards making an effective sound decision. Employees are highly exposed to the work more than the management and are more likely to have solutions towards work challenges built from the experience. According to Munn, many decisions influence the employees of an organization directly and their involvement in the implementation process can help the management come up with decisions that are likely to impact positively on the employees and avoid those that might impact them negatively.

It is therefore important to involve students in the decision making the process as they are the most affected by the decisions in the education sector. Also, students, as suggested my Munn are more exposed to the academic challenges lowering the performance of the students than the management and are more likely to help the management come up with effective sound decisions that sought to solve the identified loopholes in the performance.

Findings and Conclusions

This study used meta-analysis to assess the content from sources that used primary data on the central topic of the lack of effective leadership training and its effect on decision making. From the results, four distinct results emerged as follows. Firstly, it was found that when leaders fail to go through effective leadership they tend to lack both dynamism and focus. Such leaders tend to be slow decision makers since they do not have a definite direction to follow. For these reasons, this study concluded that the lack of focus and dynamism in leaders which arises due in effective leadership training leads to an inflexible and multi-directional leadership. Thus, the decision-making process is gravely affected because without a specific and united sense of direction, the leader will have over-ambitious plans that will not materialize as reported by Howdhury (2014).

Further, it was found that the lack of dynamism leads to poor decision making in a report by Ololube (2017) that established that leaders often stick to the same ideas even when faced by situations that require a change of tact. Thus, without dynamism the leadership forces the followers to use the same methods in their work for a long time even when such work has been surrounded by change. With the technological changes occurring ubiquitously in the world, leaders must learn to be dynamic to allow the decision-making process to be more accurate and effective in the face of changes. Therefore, on this finding the study made the same conclusion that such leadership is inflexible and not unidirectional.

Another finding was that with poor leadership training, there formation of high performance teams by such leaders is virtually impossible. Today, most organizations do well with high performance teams to improve the performance of each worker across board. Without such teams, it is not possible to achieve wholesome performance as some of the highly skilled workers will overshadow the semi-skilled workers. This leads to low motivation amongst workers which leads to gross demotivation of a majority of the workers with time (Santos, Caetano & Tavares, 2015). Therefore, this finding led to the conclusion that ineffective leadership training leads to poor performances across board due to the lack of high performance teams.

In yet another finding, it was established that poor leadership training leads to poor coordination. Leaders, as reported by Munn (2017), often juggle several activities at once. They are responsible for coordinating all core processes so that unplanned overlaps of the processes do not occur. As well, the leader is expected to effectively coordinate all the leadership positions below them so that the leaders do not interfere with each other’s work. For this reason, the study concluded that poor goal-setting was the result of poor leadership training. This conclusion was aligned with the earlier inference that without teamwork performances are hard to maintain at a high. Thus, without team work and with poor goal-setting capabilities of the leader, then leadership lacks vision. Without vision, challenges cannot be handled well.

From all these inferences and conclusions obtained from the meta-analysis, two major alternative solutions. One of them is that leaders with the mention qualities of lack of dynamism, focus and goal setting capabilities can attend leadership seminars that will address issues specific to them. Such leaders ought to know that attending such a seminar requires them to participate actively to ensure that possible skill gaps that they have are covered. This will improve their leadership comprehensively (Munn, 2017). The image shown below shows the logical diagram

Findings Conclusions Alternative Solutions

Ethical Considerations

From an ethical consideration, the study applied several considerations to ensure that ethically the study was in a good position. Firstly, the study ensured that all borrowed ideas and concepts from other sources were all well cited. This was done to prevent using another author’s information as one’s own. This would a crime on copyright but it would also be unethical which is why the study adhered to it. Further, the study avoided using the names of the respondents whose responses were used. Therefore, one of the ways that the study selected sources for the meta-analysis is by checking whether the anonymity of the respondents was respected. This was part of the ethical considerations in the preliminary stages of the study. Thirdly, the study ensured that all the sources collected for analysis were such that information was meant for scientific reasons only. Once this was established, the next step was to ensure that the information on the study was going to be used for scientific reasons only just like the other sources.

Further, the use of other sources for a meta-analysis needed to be acknowledged. It would ethically inconsiderate to use these sources for more than just the ideas and findings. Using them for their data need extra permission from the authors of those respective sources. Therefore, the author of this study made it a point to send email requesting permission to use the data for a meta-analysis. Once the response was received, the study went ahead to consider the sources for use. This was meant to ensure that apart from the copyright laws being adhered to the authors wanted to make sure that the ethical misdeed of using the hard work of other authors was also respected. This way, the study ensures that all the possible and essential ethical considerations were met in the course of completing the study.

Implementing Alternate Solutions

During the research, there are various factors that were stated. These factors impact the leadership styles on decision making. The alternative solutions that were provided include; determining the root cause of the poor leadership and providing solutions for instance counseling, providing leadership training and seminars to the leaders, evaluating tasks assigned to the leaders and improving the planning process and formation of high-performance teams and increasing the employee motivation

The image shown below shows the logical diagram with alternate solutions

Findings Conclusions Alternative Solutions

First, several leadership issues that affect the decision-making process tend to originate from a personal level i.e. health, family, marriage, work relations etc. These factors can greatly affect the performance levels of leaders. When the root causes of the poor leadership are determined they relevant authorities can assist by reducing the effects of such factors trough methods such as counseling, providing financial assistance to the affected persons and other relevant methods that are in accordance to the company policy. Some companies in the United States normally provide employee assistance programs that ensure that the private lives of each employee do not affect their performance and behavior at the workplace (Christian Fisher, 2018).

Additionally, providing leadership training and seminars is an essential alternative solution in ensuring that the leadership styles that various people in authority choose to adopt do not affect their delivery of services to the people who depend on them . As illustrated above lack of focus and dynamism may result in leadership that is not productive and lacks direction. The leadership seminars and training before the people assume their various roles assists in ensuring that they have a concept of the goals that are required of them.

In discussing the plausibility of these solutions, the alternative solutions provided above have the credible and applicable to the real-life situations. Evaluating tasks and improving the planning process in leadership also is an alternative solution to improve the leadership decisions and their impacts on the leadership outcome. When the tasks that are assigned to the individuals are carefully assessed. The leaders will not be jumping from one task to another without ensuring the completion of other tasks.

Formation of high-performance teams and employee motivation can also bring out the best in the leadership. For instance, if there is a skill gap in the leadership of a person, a member of the team in which the leader is working under can fill the gap and ensure that there is no negative impact in the leadership. They have been tried by other people and thus they are true. Besides, the alternative solutions provided are not hard to implement. For instance; the company investigating the cause of a problem, motivating employees and formation of effective teams. However, the organization of seminars and leadership training may cost a lot of money and is not entirely acceptable to all companies.

The intended consequences of the alternative solutions provided above are meant to improve leadership by ensuring that decisions are made accordingly. The solutions are also meant to evade the negative consequences that result from the poor leadership. The unintended consequences that result from the above solutions include costing the companies money through seminars. Other unintended consequences are changing the structures of the way companies are lead for instance the introduction of programs to evaluate the tasks assigned to various leaders, assessing personal skills, employee welfare, and motivation programs.

The best solution that addresses the organizational issue is the organization of the training and the seminars on leadership. During the training, interactive sessions can be conducted to address the gaps in skills that exist in the organization. The leaders can also be assisted to know the weaknesses that they possess and how they can ensure that they don’t affect the work outcome negatively. Additionally, the leaders can be trained on how to separate their personal life from work and the key roles that they should perform in the organization.

Summary

The research will indulge further on an analysis of existing literature covering the area of research and the specific problem inquiry linking leadership style, decision making and organization performance. This will be helpful in acquiring a better perspective of previous research done in the area of research covering different target audience and help one establish a basis and guide to data collection and analysis

Low academic performance is linked to leadership and management styles used in making decisions. Leaders’ personal traits determine the nature of leadership and the decision-making techniques. The education sector is structured into different management units resulting in many leadership levels and subject to varying decision-making levels imposing variations in academic performances. To improve academic performances, one needs to improve leadership and management styles and techniques as they are the key determinant of the success.

To come up with an effective sound decision, it is important for one to study and understand the strength and weaknesses of various styles as applied in various organizations. This research has reviewed analysis of other others related to the decision-making process to come up with improved techniques and styles of decision making to solving poor academic performance.

References

CHOWDHURY, R. G. (2014). A STUDY ON THE IMPACT OF LEADERSHIP STYLES ON EMPLOYEE MOTIVATION AND COMMITMENT:. Navi Mumbai. Retrieved from http://www.dypatil.edu/schools/management/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/A-study-of-the-Impact-of-Leadership-Styles-on-Employee-Motivation-and-Commitment-An-empirical-study-of-selected-organisations-in-Corporate-sector-Rima-Chowdhury.pdf

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Leadership is inflexible and not unidirectional

No teamwork leads to low performances

Goal setting is not effective

Lack of focus

Lack of dynamism

High performance teams are not achieved

Poor coordination

Leadership is inflexible and not unidirectional

No teamwork leads to low performances

Goal setting is not effective

Providing leadership trainings and seminars

Evaluating tasks and improving the planning process

Lack of focus

Lack of dynamism

High performance teams are not achieved

Poor coordination

Determining the root cause of the poor leadership and providing solutions for instance counselling

Formation of high performance teams and employee motivation