Leadership assessment has been a particular point of difficulty for contemporary scholarship, with many practitioners rejecting academically-driven leadership instruments and scales and preferring their own, less rigorous, scales. We believe that current conceptualizations and measurements of leadership are problematic, indicated by contemporary challenges that can be widely understood as failures of leadership (e.g. the Australian Banking Royal Commission and Volkswagen's ‘Dieselgate’). Also, how effective leadership is measured needs to change. This paper presents a systematic review of 17 leadership scales developed in the new millennium. The majority of scales lack some degree of rigor. Our response has been to conduct eighteen critical checks over four stages of scale development: theory generation, item development, content validity, and empirical evaluation. On the premise that understanding past practices, with their limitations, can be used to drive forward a suite of more effective organizational tools, we provide best practice recommendations using contemporary psychometric research.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	scale development, leadership assessment, factor analysis, content adequacy, theory generation
Research Division:	Commerce, Management, Tourism and Services
Research Group:	Strategy, management and organisational behaviour
Research Field:	Organisational behaviour
Objective Division:	Expanding Knowledge
Objective Group:	Expanding knowledge
Objective Field:	Expanding knowledge in commerce, management, tourism and services
UTAS Author:	Crawford, J (Dr Joseph Crawford)
UTAS Author:	Kelder, J-A (Dr Jo-Anne Kelder)
ID Code:	127215
Year Published:	2019 (online first 2018)
Web of Science® Times Cited:	21
Deposited By:	TSBE
Deposited On:	2018-07-18
Last Modified:	2019-08-28
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