Article S9.6 Change-Related Leadership: Extending the Asian Perspectives of Excellence in Leadership (APEL) Model Seminar Leader: Richard Laferriere Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia rlaferriere[at]groupwise.swin.edu.au Note. Doctoral candidate Richard Laferriere presented his research-in-progress to staff and students of the School of Business and Design, Swinburne Sarawak, in October 2011. Laferriere’s work centres around extending the Asian Perspectives of Excellence in Leadership (APEL) model (Selvarajah, 1995) to include a focus on change-related leadership, which he has centred on one of the core behavioural categories of change-related leadership: enabling creativity and innovation. The Asian Perspectives of Excellence in Leadership (APEL) model interprets leadership behaviours in terms of the underlying sources of influence. Four broad categories of influence are recognised: (a) Personal: the deep rooted values, beliefs, and the individual’s approach to life, (b) Managerial: influences arising from managerial roles and responsibilities, (c) Organisational: organisational goals, pressures, and culture, and (d) Environmental: influences from outside the organisation that may relate to political, socio-cultural, economic, or legal factors (Selvarajah, Duignan, Suppiah, Lane, & Nuttman, 1995). The empirically supported APEL model and survey instrument have been used across Asia, developed and validated first in the ASEAN nations and later in other Eastern Asian and Southern Asian nations (Selvarajah, 2010). The model appears to be effective in identifying values in a given culture, as well as indicating the linkage between leadership preference and demographic variables such as age, religion, and gender. The APEL model is complementary to other leadership and cross-cultural studies, including the cultural dimensions found in other studies reported by Hofstede (2001) and House et al. (House, Hanges, Mansour, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Laferriere argued that an important area of leadership research that was not originally included in the APEL model relates to the management of change or change-related leadership. One of the fundamental components of change-related leadership is enabling innovation and creativity. Behaviours enabling creativity and innovation involve motivating employees to be creative, managing teams, working in creative endeavour, positioning the organisation to develop innovations, and acting upon cues from the external environment. Lafarriere’s work on the inclusion of change-related factors may lead to three specific research outcomes. It may expand leadership studies by providing insights into how leaders perceive the behaviours associated with enabling creativity. It may provide empirical evidence for the expanded APEL instrument to be used in further leadership research that pertains to understanding behaviour enabling innovation and creativity. Moreover, it may allow for a change in understanding of what qualifies as excellence in leadership, using data collected from across Asia. The conceptual framework is presented in Figure 1. Figure 1. Conceptual framework for the study of change-related leadership. Laferriere identified six research questions emerging from the conceptual framework: Question 1: Is the set of creativity-enabling behaviours an element of perceived excellence in leadership? Question 2: Are creativity-enabling behaviours important to perceived excellence in leadership when creativity and innovation are perceived to be important to the organisation? Question 3: Are the identified creativity-enabling behaviours nested within the categories of the APEL model? Question 4: Will the creativity-enabling behaviours, perceived as excellent behaviours, differ across predictor variables such as gender, age, years of experience, industry, education, and attitudes. Question 5: What other behaviours perceived as excellence will moderate the importance of creativity-enabling behaviours? Question 6: How does excellence in leadership, as it pertains to enabling creativity, reflect national culture? Having developed and expanded the APEL survey questionnaire, Laferriere is planning to use the Opinio software to release a survey electronically. In order to reach the desired respondents, a business-to-business panel (provided by a market research company, Research Now) will be used to ensure both confidentiality and representativeness. Data will be analysed using multivariate statistical analysis. Richard Laferriere selected this topic for his doctoral research because he believes that a profile of Australian leaders’ perspectives on excellence in leadership should provide valuable insights on how Australian leaders perceive creativity-enabling behaviours. His research seeks to extend the APEL model further into Australia, which is uniquely positioned as a multicultural nation, a Western nation, and an Anglo-Saxon nation (House, Hanges, Mansour, Dorfman, & Gupta, 2004). Australia is also experiencing a growing recognition as being part of Asia (Higgott & Nossal, 2008). The results from Australia will present a future opportunity to re-examine the results in other countries. The results of this study may enable us to reconsider our understanding of innovation and creativity, particularly their meaning and relevance in Asian cultural contexts. References Higgott, R. A., & Nossal, K. R. (2008). Odd man in, odd man out: Australia’s liminal position in Asia revisited: A reply to Ann Capling. Pacific Review, 21(5), 623-634. Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s consequences: Comparing values, behaviors, institutions, and organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. House, R. J., Hanges, P. J., Mansour, J., Dorfman, P., & Gupta, V. (2004). Culture, leadership, and organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Selvarajah, C. (2010). Asian perspectives on excellence in leadership: Getting at culture. Unpublished manuscript. Melbourne, Australia: Swinburne University of Technology. Selvarajah, C., Duignan, P., Suppiah, C., Lane, T., & Nuttman, C. (1995). In search of the ASEAN leader: An exploratory study of the dimensions that relate to excellence in leadership. Management International Review, 35(1), 29-44. Reported by Preeti Agrawal, with input from Richard Laferriere; edited by Heidi Collins and D. P. Dash. 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