For this post, I’d like to talk about what I learned through my master’s thesis. The whole focus was on taking leadership insights from the sport world and to test their relevence in chamber ensembles. The At the end, you’ll find a very small bibliography if you're interested in reading up on the subject. The broad goal of the whole project was to compare sports teams to chamber ensembles in some way. My supervisor and I specifically looked at leadership models in sport and their transferability to chamber groups. “Shared Leadership in Chamber Ensembles: A Study Borrowing from Sport Psychology” became the paper’s fancy title.
We decided to tackle this issue for a couple reasons. Firstly and simply, leadership is considered an important element in both teams and ensembles. Secondly, we noticed the sport world was using a theory of leadership which we thought would perfectly apply to chamber music groups. This leadership theory, termed “Shared Leadership Theory,” was being used by researchers to explain that not all leadership functions of a team are carried out by one leader. Leadership could be exhibited “formally” by elected leaders (captains, coaches), but could also be exhibited “informally” by any other member of the team. This theory originated in the arena of business psychology and has been used by sport researchers for the last dozen years to examine athlete leadership in a new light. By examining leadership with a new theory in sports, researchers have drawn up a few models of how this theory plays out in teams. One of these models examines four types of the informal leaders mentioned above. Here’s a quick description of the four types of informal leadership roles included in the model we used in our study. Task Leader: focuses on training and instruction. Motivational Leader: offers encouragement on the field. Social Leader: ensures group harmony and includes members in social events. External Leader: represents the group publicly and to other organizations. We found this model in a survey study done by Katrien Fransen and several other researchers (the full citation is at the bottom of this blog). We took the questionnaire from this study, modified the wording to better fit chamber ensembles, and tested it on 44 musicians to see if we came up with similar results. Part one of the project: Respondents to the questionnaire were asked to indicate which members of their group best represented the roles of task, social, motivational, and external leaders. We first checked this part of the project to see if these roles emerged at all in the groups. All roles were considered present by at least four out of five participants. We secondly checked to see if these roles were held by different people in the groups, or if respondents considered one groupmate to be the only leader and occupy all the roles. We found that overlap was very minimal, showing that these roles were definitely separate things from one another. Part two of the project: Respondents to the questionnaire were then asked if they considered any member of their group to be a leader not fitting the four provided definitions, and to describe this extra leader. This wouldn’t provide any conclusive evidence, but would provide hints for directions other studies could take on the topic. From the descriptions we received, we had rough sketches of two extra leadership roles: the Organizational Leader and the Leader-by-Example. Versions of the Organizational Leader pop up in various studies on chamber ensembles, being called “deputy,” or “organizer.” So, we speculated that this role might be good to include in the list of chamber ensemble leadership roles (more studies needed, of course). The Leader-by-Example, however, mostly consisted of traits used in sport studies to describe general leadership. We speculated that this might not be a separate leadership role, but actually a set of characteristics you’d find in any informal leadership role in music. These traits were things like “talented, musical, skilled, professional, etc.” So, we found that the model used in sports can be transferred very well to chamber music groups, and that there may be a “Organizational Leader” that could be added to the model. So how do we use this information? Firstly, in the studies of Shared Leadership in sports research, it’s recommended that coaches try to build teams with a balance of the different leadership types. So, when picking your chamber groups, it’d be best to have a task, social, motivational, and external leader instead of four task leaders. Secondly, it’s important to remember that behaviours that are recognized and rewarded are likely to continue or increase. So, complimenting your groupmates for their leadership can inspire more leadership in the future. Good team leadership breeds more team leadership. This also applies to ensemble coaches – recognizing and praising leadership roles you see in your students could have a great impact on the group’s growth. It’s important to remember, though, that there are chamber groups who are masters at these leadership roles without knowing they exist. In our little study, we just put labels on stuff that’s already happening. It’s like I said in the last blog; the research can still learn a lot from the musicians, but now we have some research that the musicians can learn from as well. So, the best thing to do is move everything forward and learn from every angle. Research informs practice, and practice informs research. Thanks for reading! See you next time. -Mark Further Reading... For the origins of Shared Leadership Theory: Pearce, C. L., & Conger, J. A. (2002). Shared leadership: Reframing the hows and whys of leadership. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. For Shared Leadership Theory in Sport: Loughead, T. M., Munroe-Chandler, K. J., Hoffmann, M. D., & Duguay, A. M. (2014). Athlete Leadership in Sport. In M. Beuchamp (Ed.), Group Dynamics in Exercise and Sport Psychology (pp. 110 – 127). New York, NY: Routledge. For Fransen’s study: Fransen, K., Vanbeselaere, N., De Cuyper, B., Vande Broek, G., & Boen, F. (2014). The myth of the team captain as principal leader: extending the athlete leadership classification within sport teams. Journal of sports sciences, 25(2), 1-9.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
May 2017
Categories |