Leadership for Empowerment: Analyzing Leadership Practices in a Youth Care Organization Using Peer Video Reflection

In recent years, increased complexity and persistent challenges induced governmental organizations to transform their ways of operating. Inherent to such transformations are shifts in approaches to leadership and organizational learning. However, adopting strategies that empower staff to take complex context-appropriate decisions has shown to be difficult. This paper aims to gain insight into empowering and disempowering leadership practices in complex transformation processes. Team leaders of a governmental organization participated in observing videos of weekly team meetings, noting positive and negative interactions between the peer-team leader and team members. Their observations were analyzed using the four dimensions of psychological empowerment. All team leaders showed empowering and disempowering practices within one case discussion. The findings illustrate in which contexts these practices are triggered. Results help to theoretically elucidate academic debates about the relationships between empowerment and control, differences between empowerment and laissez-faire and between empowering and destructive leadership in human service organizations

Video-Based Action Learning and Research: Increased Transformative Capacity among Team Leaders of a Youth Care Protection Agency

Public organizations need to learn and evolve continuously to keep up with emerging complexities. This may require a transformational organizational change, including culture, strategy, structure and working methods for service delivery. The aim of the study is to understand how a video-based reflection method could support an action learning (AL) and action research (AR) process to enhance transformative capacity among a group of team leaders in a changing youth care organization. Sixteen team leaders participated in the video-reflection process. The steps were: (1) all leaders were filmed leading a team meeting; (2) each leader reflected on a peer’s video; and (3) reflections were analyzed, and themes were abstracted. (4) Related to these themes, video fragments were compiled to share with the leaders in Focus Group Discussions (FGDs), where the leaders discussed the videos and formulated key lessons. (5) Key lessons were summarized in a report. Data collection included: video-recordings, evaluation sheets and field notes acquired during the process of video-reflection and seven months later, interviews with team leaders (n = 11) about their learning experiences. This study shows greater transformative capacity in most of the team leaders. Awareness of their work practice, as well as the process of reflexive monitoring during the FGDs, contributed to widening the scope of their reflective reality, and thus their sense of agency in adapting their practices, such as moderating their occasionally controlling behavior, being able to structure the team meetings effectively, and understanding when to use specific leadership roles