I have mentioned construct proliferation in my blogs and promised to get a little more in depth.  Well, here we go!  What is construct proliferation?  I would wager that many people have not heard this term, but you may have heard the term nuclear proliferation.  Nuclear proliferation was the rapid increase in numbers of nuclear weapons which necessitated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968.  Construct proliferation is the same thing, minus the nuclear weapons and the treaty.  Proliferation just means to grow by rapid production (often used to describe the growth of a cell or organism).  Easy!  We are already halfway done.  But now comes the hard part:  What is a construct?  See reference 1 for an in-depth breakdown, but I’ll do my best to give a user-friendly explanation.  A construct is a mental abstraction to broaden or narrow perspective on a topic.  In research it’s a process of information reduction to focus only on what you are interested in.  Constructs can be ideas, people, organizations, events, or things.  An example of a construct is sexism, the meaning we are trying to convey with that construct is prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex, according to dictionary.com.

A construct can vary based on how difficult they are to observe, understand, and measure.  You can easily use the construct of Sex, which is scientifically and academically either male or female.  But if you consider gender, social scientists argue that there are far more attributes (transsexual, cisgender, non-binary, etc.).  While sex and gender are often used interchangeably, there is a significant difference in what they mean.  This is especially important in research, where precise wording is of the utmost importance.

With that terribly incomplete but mercifully brief synopsis of constructs in mind, imagine the difficulty in trying to study something that cannot even be clearly defined such as leadership.  Because it is so hard to define is exactly why there has been an almost comical growth in leadership theories. A theory is basically a way to explain phenomena, predict and understand outcomes, and expand on current knowledge.  If you looked up servant leadership constructs, you would find a TON of conflicting information on how many constructs there are.  In 2006 (16 years ago!) Barbuto and Wheeler tried to form a consensus with their paper Scale Development and Construct Clarification of Servant Leadership (ref 2, cited by 2,141).  They developed definitions and scales to measure 11 previously utilized characteristics of servant leadership: calling, listening, empathy, healing, awareness, persuasion, conceptualization, foresight, stewardship, growth, and community building.  Of those 11, their research found 5 factors (altruistic calling, emotional healing, wisdom, persuasive mapping, and organizational stewardship) which appeared conceptually and empirically distinct. 

That was a lot of work on their part to boil 11 previously accepted constructs down to just 5 for parsimony in the field.  Great, now what’s Parsimony?  I’m glad you asked.  It just means that when multiple theories account for the same facts, you use the one that’s briefer, makes less assumptions and references to things you cannot directly observe, and has greater generality is the one researchers should use.  Well, Barbuto and Wheeler knocked 11 constructs down to 5 way back in 2006, so that’s what we use today, right?  Of course not.  In 2011, Dirk Van Dierendock suggested 6 (empowering and developing people, humility, authenticity, interpersonal acceptance, providing direction, and stewardship) constructs to “synthesize” previous servant leadership research in his aptly named paper Servant Leadership: A Review and Synthesis (ref 3, cited by 2,655).  So that’s what we use today, right?  Nope (sad trombone sound).  Unfortunately, all previous constructs get used for is to make new constructs.  In response, previous authors will come out with new papers to criticize other conceptual models and try to re-prove that their research is really the correct method.  And the dance goes on and on.

If this all seems a bit cyclical and counterproductive to you, then I am happy I am not alone.  Also remember, this is only one leadership theory.  There are currently somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 (seven zero, seventy!) academically accepted (meaning published in a reputable journal) theories on leadership.  I’m fairly certain that does not include non-academic “theories” that you will see on your bookstore shelves incredible numbers.  That’s one reason I don’t understand why someone would call themselves a servant leader (or any particular kind of theoretical leader) when the experts don’t even agree on what it really means.  And that’s not an expert on leadership in the general term, these are experts who hang their hats on being profoundly involved with this ONE leadership theory.  And by the way, how do you measure humility in servant leadership?  With a survey?  That the leader themselves fill out about being humble?  Don’t worry, I’ll have another blog on surveys, because they suck.  No wonder the hard sciences laugh at social sciences. Oh, and many research papers are hidden behind pay walls. Nothing quite like paying $35 for something nobody outside of other academics want to read.

Here is a slightly better, but still quick breakdown of construct proliferation now that we have covered a few of the basics (I’ll leave it italicized in case you want to skip parts written a little more academically):  Construct proliferation is the idea “wherein the observed correlations of new constructs with existing constructs are so similar and their patterns of correlation with other variables are so alike to suggest that they may be redundant” (Cole et al., 2012).  Shaffer et al. (2016) say “the accumulation of ostensibly different but potentially identical constructs representing organizational phenomena is a salient problem in contemporary research.” Many researchers theorize about leadership without fully comparing their new constructs to existing ones.  This is partially because researchers place an emphasis on specific traits, behaviors, or styles that are not discussed or developed in other theories (references 6 and 7).

By this point I’m sure I have angered either some other authors, researchers, experts, or readers who identify as servant leaders, but hang onto your Bunsen burner, it gets worse!  Now that we understand there is a very fertile breeding ground for people to write paper upon paper for the advancement of their own careers…. wait, how do people advance their careers with research?  There’s no actual motive to just kick the same can down the road and bleed multiple papers out of the same research, is there?  That is an amazing question!  Yes!  There is ALL the incentive to do just that!  It’s easier to see the benefits of putting out a new book (not the least of which being revenue), but in academia, the authors of these papers are normally teachers at institutes of higher learning.  Most of them would like to attain a magical status known as tenure (ref 4.).  If they reach this milestone, they can NOT get fired for almost anything short of a criminal offense.  To get tenure, not only do you have to teach, secure grant funding, do a lot of work tenured professors don’t want to do, but you also have to, wait for it, publish papers!  To move up the academic hierarchy, you have to meet minimum publishing requirements.  If you have a full-time job, how do you make time to write papers and publish?  By rehashing a lot of the same research, using the same data, and making minor adjustments to theories and models that others have used.

As Bert Kreischer (ref 5) might say, secret time.  I did not finish my PhD.  I did not defend my dissertation.  There are (basically) 4 steps to get a doctorate outside of medicine.  Do the required course work, take an exam to prove you know what you need to know, present a prospectus defense, and defend your dissertation.  You write your dissertation along the way, but the last year is when a lot of the heavy lifting gets done.  Why would I get so close, do so much work, and then simply walk away?  Because in academia I was not allowed to have an independent thought.  I had a terrible professor, I won’t name them or describe a lot of the reasons I have zero respect for this individual in this forum, but I do credit them with giving me every reason I needed to walk away from my program right at the cusp of completion.  All that said, a big push I got while pursuing my PhD was to aim small on my research just to graduate.  That’s what a lot of students are told.  Don’t try to boil the ocean, or something to that effect.  With that, you can only choose certain topics and theories or write the types of research that will a) benefit your instructor (committee chair) and b) they are comfortable and familiar with. That was my experience and the experience of many PhD students I have talked to across multiple universities, but in full disclosure I cannot say that is the experience everywhere.  I was pushed to work on a meta-analysis, but that is just synthesizing and summarizing the work of other people.  Pretty boring and unoriginal to be honest, but hey, it gets publications (side note, I did not go in that direction).  I’ll get more into my take on certain types of research later, but I want you to understand the pressure that is on researchers to conform from day one and understand that there are a ton of incentives to publish research, even in its unhelpful to the field or just plain bad.  We will need to talk about journals and publications at another time too, I need to put a bow on construct proliferation for now.

It’s not all doom and gloom on the leadership front, but I am concerned that a lot of practitioners (leaders out in the real world) don’t understand the confused state of leadership research.  I am equally concerned that researchers are out of touch with what practitioners want and need or incentivized to not listen.  That is why I named my website and podcast Leadership is Hard.  Because it is.  How do you observe and measure leadership?  How do you know you are making progress?  Do p-values really give any insight into observed phenomena?  Don’t worry, we will cover p-values when we talk about surveys.  I think that when you strip away all the pomp and circumstance from the field of leadership research, we can find a lot of useful information.  Should we care if you call it one name versus another?  I call my north stars empathy and transparency, but I might define that differently than everyone else.  It still works for me.  What I hope to help people work on is finding their values, and then helping them put the right tools in their toolbox (if you read my previous blog article).  In the meantime, let’s work to be humble, work to be kind, and work to be a little better today than we were yesterday. Thank you for your time, and please keep an eye out for my upcoming podcast!

1. https://dissertation.laerd.com/constructs-in-quantitative-research.php
2. Barbuto Jr, John E., and Daniel W. Wheeler. “Scale development and construct clarification of servant leadership.” Group & organization management 31.3 (2006): 300-326.
3. Van Dierendonck, Dirk. “Servant leadership: A review and synthesis.” Journal of management 37.4 (2011): 1228-1261.
4. https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2009/03/27/what-i-wish-id-known-about-tenure
5. https://www.bertbertbert.com/
6. Cole, Michael S., et al. “Job burnout and employee engagement: A meta-analytic examination of construct proliferation.” Journal of management 38.5 (2012): 1550-1581.
7. Shaffer, Jonathan A., David DeGeest, and Andrew Li. “Tackling the problem of construct proliferation: A guide to assessing the discriminant validity of conceptually related constructs.” Organizational Research Methods 19.1 (2016): 80-110.