Murray Prideaux

Understanding leadership in the environmental sciences

Leadership is often assumed, intuitively, to be an important driver of sustainable development. To understand how leadership is conceptualized and analyzed in the environmental sciences and to discover what this research says about leadership outcomes, we conducted a review of environmental leadership research over the last 10 years. We found that much of the environmental leadership literature focuses on a few key individuals and desirable leadership competencies. The literature also reports that leadership is one of the most important of a number of factors contributing to effective environmental governance. Only a subset of the literature highlights interacting sources of leadership, disaggregates leadership outcomes, or evaluates leadership processes in detail. We argue that the literature on environmental leadership is highly normative. Leadership is typically depicted as an unequivocal good, and its importance is often asserted rather than tested. We trace how leadership studies in the management sciences are evolving and argue that, taking into account the state of the art in environmental leadership research, more critical approaches to leadership research in environmental science can be developed.

Principalship in an Indonesian School Context: Can Principal Decision-Making Styles Significantly Predict Teacher Job Satisfaction?.

This paper examines relationships between teacher-perceived principal decision-making styles and teacher job satisfaction in schools in Lampung Province, Indonesia. We use the General Decision-making Style instrument, the Job Satisfaction Survey and a demographic questionnaire developed for this study. Our findings show that: 12 out of the 15 relationships tested were significant; rational, intuitive, dependent and avoidant decision-making styles were significant predictors of teacher job satisfaction; and these are still significant predictors after the possible effects of gender, marital status, teacher certification and school location are controlled for.

Leadership Styles and Decision-Making Styles in an Indonesian School Context.

School leadership has been well researched in developed countries. However, in Asia, particularly in Indonesia, school leadership has not been well explored. Using survey data from a sample of 475 teachers in six Lampung school districts, this paper examines the relationships between school principal leadership styles and school principal decision-making styles in an Indonesian school context. Findings are that most of the relationships between school principal leadership styles and school principal decision-making styles are significant. These findings suggest that teachers perceive that principals should exhibit much more transformational leadership style and rational decision-making style but avoid laissez-faire leadership style and avoidant decision-making style.

Inbound event tourism attendees: a group qualities-values approach at destination

Purpose – The inbound event tourists drawn to an Australian destination to participate in one of 14 annual international auto racing (AR) events can be sectioned to release each group’s behavioural perspectives around their tourism-related impacts on the destination. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Inbound event tourists attending the destination are surveyed during the three-day major event. Each respondent displays non-uniform, personally driven agendas and varying degrees of local tourism acceptance. Findings – Inbound event tourists self-select into one of six psychologically framed AR sport groupings, and exhibit micro-differences that can then be used to align local tourism around future. Research limitations/implications – The authors do not consider locals attending this international series AR event, but project their destination tourism and event impacts to be less than those of inbound event tourists. Totally, 90 per cent of inbound AR event tourists each f...

Teacher-Perceived Principal Leadership Styles, Decision-Making Styles and Job Satisfaction: How Congruent Are Data from Indonesia with the Anglophile and Western Literature?.

ABSTRACT School leadership is seen as important for both schools and for government and private policy-makers. The relationships between teacher-perceived principal leadership styles, teacher-perceived principal decision-making styles and teacher-perceived job satisfaction in schools in Lampung Province, Indonesia were examined. Data were collected by questionnaires from 475 teachers. This paper uses Indonesian data, but the relationships studied will be of wider interest to school stakeholders in Indonesia and to a wider global readership. Considerable effort was placed on the collection of robust data to address existing gaps in the literature about these relationships. The data are available to be shared with other interested parties. Findings suggest that five variables (of the nine variables that were studied) can significantly (p < .001) predict teacher job satisfaction. Transformational leadership style and rational decision-making style are the best predictors and are likely to contribute to increased teacher job satisfaction. In contrast, laissez-faire leadership style, intuitive decision-making style and avoidant decision-making style are likely to contribute to decreased teacher job satisfaction. This paper is the third paper of five papers about school leadership in Indonesia.

Investigating Leadership Barriers in South-East Asia

This paper explores barriers impacting on leadership in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. The rise of the Asian Century is bringing global implications which are driven by leadership. However, what leadership is remains unclear and appears to be many things to many people. The unique contexts of Asia are not adequately explained by the ‘Western’ centric positivist psychological and social-psychological frames of the extant literature. This study brings a ‘macro’ country perspective within the emerging ‘Worldly’ view to investigate leadership through local practice and indigenous notions. Our results suggest that understanding barriers specific to country is important to develop robust leadership practice in the wider Asian context.