Stephen Mitchell

The module I’m studying on at the moment is all about exploring a key change you have made and critically analysing the leadership of it, using a body of literature to pull on why it worked and why it didn’t.  I wasn’t really sure where to start until a colleague (thanks Beth) suggested that I look into the changes we have made to teacher and support staff performance management in my school.

It led me to think about the purpose of performance management, who is it really for?  Is there a national disconnect in the interned purpose and the reality of how it is used? I started looking into research on ‘power in leadership’ – no surprises that there is a healthy amount of literature on this subject area.  Dijke (2020) gives a comprehensive analysis of the difference in leaders who view themselves as having ‘high’ power versus those who identify as having a ‘lower’ power approach.

Dijke defines a leader as an individual who aims to inspire and motivate followers to contribute to the collective, facilitating decision-making and coordinating followers’ efforts.  His research shows that leaders who focus on showing concern (eg emotional focussed leadership) to try and drive outcomes have the same impact as those who implement control measures (eg performance-related pay).   The difference in the decision of which to choose can fall down to the leaders’ perception of power.

Simply put, I take this to mean that the one way of percieving power in leadership is the choice of control measures a leader opts to employ to motivate their followers (again, hate that term!).

This is also down to a series of secondary factors which define the leadership: personality, identity, contextual goals, the influence of followers etc)

For me, performance management and pay related to this is not about power, particularly in a school organisation where there are clear rules and parameters for meeting and falling short of these targets.  It’s about fairness, an equality that everyone has the same opportunity to get to the next step on the pay scale or on the career ladder.  For this to happen, however, clear expectations must be in place for the setting of these targets.  This is backed up again by Dijke who goes on to explore the link that ‘procedurally fair’ leadership has on employees’ contribution to the collective.  This ultimately comes down to the perception of the followers and what they conceive to be fair.

This is where I think I am going to focus my study for the next assignment.  At the moment, I’m considering looking at the implementation of a performance management system for staff based around the teaching standards; i.e. exploring performance management through a drive on building teachers’ capabilities as opposed to measuring individual class performance.  It’s an area with lots of suggested reading and research outputs.

Anyway, another night, another 15 minute write… over and out!