The assessment of professional leadership competency with application to faith-based settings

Abstract

Traditional leadership assessment instruments have their genesis in organisations and are usually focused on the optimisation of efficiency. Increasingly, however, the need for the inclusion of ethics and purpose has been recognised, but because these are context-specific there appears to be no accepted measure for their inclusion. Consequently, professions have been averse to using extant leadership models (Evetts, 2002) as they do not accommodate the unique character of the profession nor sufficiently engage with purpose. Professions such as medicine, law, accountancy and clergy all exhibit this reticence. Building on the sociological insights of Weber (2009) and Durkheim (1972) into professions, this research postulates that professions share a common purpose for existence, that these become inculcated in their professional practitioners, and that these can be clustered into three discrete roles. This research argues that when contextually nuanced, these roles may be used to measure purpose. It proposes that purpose measurement may be integrated alongside traditionally measured performance and that purpose and performance form two ‘realms’ of competency measurement. The model developed employs The Integrated Competing Values Framework (ICVF) (Vilkinas and Cartan, 2006) as the basis of the performance realm and the theoretical professional threerole construct derived from literature for the purpose realm and synthesises them into the tworealm model (2R-ICVF) comprising seven roles in the performance realm and three in the purpose realm. A method for contextualising the competency model for professionals to any specific profession has been developed. This research showed that contextualising an instrument to the specific profession by nuancing behavioural indicators reflective of role competency, role descriptors, and role descriptions derived from the profession’s self-understanding and vocabulary is necessary for its acceptance in the profession, and this research provides a means of so doing. It discovered that a relationship between a profession and a movement may exist, that counter-intuitively may temper the profession’s willingness to change. By quantifying the purposes of professions, integrating purpose and performance into a competency model, and developing a means of contextualising the model for professions to profession-specific settings to be acceptable to the profession, significant contributions to the deeper understanding of professions and the assessment and development of professional practitioners have been made. The application to a particular setting furthers the understanding of the Sydney Anglican profession through systematising the voices of its practitioners, discerning the individual’s competency development priorities and the necessity of a professionwide unifying development program.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English