Assessing the leadership potential of choral conductors

When it comes to assessing the leadership aspects of conducting a music ensemble, the traditional focus is musical skills and knowledge, past experience, and observation, with little true understanding of leadership skills. In contrast, organizational science and psychology offer numerous methods of assessing leadership potential. A tool informed by these research disciplines would be helpful to choral organizations that are seeking a new director or those leaders wishing to assess their own leadership skills. In this study, I discuss the dynamics of leadership in the context of choral ensembles, examine several leadership aptitude assessments developed in fields other than music, and design a unique assessment approach specifically tailored to choral organizations. The study involved a sample of choral conductors (N=20) at liberal arts and state colleges in the United States who are leading successful choral programs. Participating conductors completed an anonymo! us survey, as did students in one of their ensembles (N=437) and colleagues from the school at which they worked (N=19). The answers on the three related survey respondent groups were compared in order to determine the correlations between perceived leadership style from the point of view of the conductor, student, and colleague. The validity of the assessment was tested by administering it to a sample of choral conductors in liberal arts colleges and comparing their results with questionnaire data gathered from other stakeholders (singers and colleagues). The study was designed to inform an effective approach for beginning to assess leadership attributes in a conductor and how self-perception relates to perception of leadership by singers and colleagues. Using Cronbach’s Alpha, analyses showed strong reliability on the measures of magnitude, better than average reliability for certain subscales of the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) of Avolio and Bass which were used in the study, and strong reliability for the composite scales of the MLQ, specifically those determining transformational and transactional leadership capabilities. Results show strong correlations between a conductor’s ratings on magnitude and certain communication skills with their own ratings of skills in transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and inspirational motivation. When student assessments of various leadership attributes were compared with those from other students, strong correlation existed, but when student assessments of the conductor were compared with similar self-assessments performed by the conductor, either a smaller, zero, or negative correlation occurred between the transformational, transactional, and inspi! rational motivation scores. When compared with conductor scores on the same measures as well as others believed to be related to good leadership, colleague assessments of the conductor showed either a small or nonexistent correlation within the conductors’ own ratings of themselves. The study explores how the MLQ, magnitude, and communication assessments used within might be applied to conductors to determine leadership potential and to compare the conductor’s results with students’ or colleagues’ assessments of them. The findings suggests that the elusive nature of leadership is hard to describe for ensemble conductors, and that overall success of the organization may or may not be connected to the conductor’s leadership ratings using one of the measures within the present study. Finally, conductors, just as any other leader, should be aware that one’s own perception may not reflect the experience of followers. Both self-awareness and awareness of the type of leadership modality needed in a situation might create a more closely correlated assessment of the leader’s ability to lead from the perspective of the conductor, singers, and colleagues