Faculty of Education - Theses

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End date: 1999 × Start date: 1992 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: Leadership ×

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    Managers perceptions of workplace learning
    Wright, Kirsty E ( 1999)
    This thesis sets outs the post-industrial organisation as the learning context in which the manager manages. By highlighting the set of skills that is required of the post-industrial manager it then examines how the manager learns these in the course of daily work. This was achieved by conducting interviews with a limited range of managers who are employed by the same retailing company but work across two store locations. What is apparent is that the successful manager needs to be able to respond to the emotionality of the workplace by having well honed 'people' skills of which communicability is uppermost. It was found that the 'people' skills were not only the hardest to learn but also contributed to the definition of the successful manager. The thesis also establishes that managers learn to manage in and through the workplace experiences of managing thereby supporting the contention that learning is fundamentally a socialisation process which occurs within a specific context and, within that, the most meaningful individual learning is, indeed, experiential. Learning to manage is very much about dealing with 'people' issues and, in this respect, the experiences of trial and error, then reflection, are the manager's teacher.
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    A regional and metropolitan comparative study of staff leadership development: implications for multiple leadership of projects
    Anderson, Michelle ( 1998)
    Leadership is a common term and is not bound to any one particular context or situation (Duke: 1998). Why is it then that something so common is so difficult to encapsulate and then translate to others? Leadership is almost a 'given'. We can identify leadership when we see 'it' in action and we can describe leadership as a composite of qualities and characteristics. However, describing and apportioning the precise qualities and characteristics of an effective leader - in the hope that the recipe for 'it' or effective leadership can be passed on - is difficult. What appears to be consistent in the literature about effective leadership is that it will involve, as Wright (1996) describes, "interaction, either direct or indirect, between people" (230). While the influence of formal position has been extensively researched and written about (Campbell-Evans & Begley: 1996, Drucker: 1996, Kets De Vries: 1995, Bolman & Deal: 1991), "the interaction of role and gender adds yet another dynamic" (Mertz & McNeely: 1998: 213). This study investigates staff leadership development, with a particular focus on women, at a school level, within the Victorian Government's drug reform strategy, Turning the Tide. The aim is to surface particular understandings and practices of what the women within the study believe to be important characteristics, qualities and practices of effective leadership. The major questions addressed by the study were: - How may leadership development for school personnel charged with the responsibility of project leadership be characterised and improved? - Are there any differences that relate to gender? - How are vocational development materials used in staff project leadership development? - How may knowledge be incorporated from people other than those in formal positions of power in schools?