Leadership Training, Leadership Strategies and Organizational Performance: Designing an Experiment to Test the Causal Effect of Leadership on Performance

Leadership is fundamentally important for improving public sector performance, but the existing literature has severe endogeneity problems. Using a field experiment with 720 Danish leaders and 23.000 employees, the LEAP (Leadership and Performance) project will try to overcome these problems. We use a field experiment to study the effects of leadership training and leadership strategies on organizational performance. The research question is how leadership training affect leadership strategies, and how these strategies affect performance? This paper takes three steps towards answering this question. First, we discuss the conceptualization of leadership strategies. Second, we present our research design and clarify how we expect the leadership training to affect leadership strategies. Third, we discuss briefly how we measure the key concepts: Leadership and performance. Our aim is to develop stronger conceptualizations and operationalizations of transformational and transactional leadership strategies which do not confound leadership strategies with their effects. It is also important to understand how leadership strategies might have different effect in different settings and for different performance measures. Finally, developing leadership training programs to accommodate the problem of causality is also a very important task.