Karen, have a look at Lars Tummers and Eva Knies' work on developing a scale instrument for measuring public leadership. It is attached below. It may give you some ideas on developing a suitable (quantitative) survey. The keywords you should use so that you do not wind up with business administration-ish literature include "public leadership," "public innovation," and "public entrepreneurship."

Hope this helps

On Decision Making, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/266477995_On_Decision_Making, eschews leader traits, roles, and competencies to examine decision making as a stream of inquiry, not an event. Decision-driven organizations design and manage it as such: they match decision-making styles to appropriate techniques and, wherever possible, encourage parties to play roles rife with dissent and debate; decision rights are part of the design.

Article On Decision Making

The first approach: the manager area (financial or not financial); so the goals set to the decision maker; different measures for different goals, reached or not, or the percentage level of reaching the goals; reached on time or delayed.

The second approach: 4 main functions of management (planning, organizing, leading in execution, controll); do the decisions cover aforementioned functions

The third one - timing: are decisions made on time, without dispensable delay (Jack Welch GE; Peter Drucker "One minute manager").

 Thank you Emmanuel - really interesting paper and spring board for the specific area I wish to explore.

Much appreciated

 Hi Olivier -

This is a very rich article, thank you. I will communicate with you further to discuss some specific elements - working my way through & will compile more in depth thoughts & questions which I hope you will participate further..

Cheers,

Karen

Thanks Hubert - It looks like the model I want to explore will encompass your suggestions. The financial decisions are most often covered as achievements of leaders however, financial direction represent a culmination of multiple stakeholders. The time factor for leader decision making is an important element in my research as I am looking at disaster management & the role of the leader can have long unintended impacts. Will keep my research community apprised of progress.

Karen, you got a very interesting topic for your doctoral research. However, it is a complex one and in my view it would be limited perspective if you are trying to design your research based only on quantitative methods and rationality. Cognitive science demonstrated that decision making is an interactive process between cognition and emotions, and decision making is not fully rational. That is important for you since leaders departs from managers mostly due to their capacity to influence people by using emotional and spiritual intelligence.

Also, we have to accept the fact that people use thinking models in understanding their environment and making decisions. The power of a decision act is given by the power of the thinking model of the decision makers. For instance, people who have a dominant linear or Newtonian thinking model will elaborate linear solutions for nonlinear problems, which may converge usually to failures. Also, people who have a dominant deterministic way of thinking will find difficulties in coping with uncertainties and assuming risks in their decisions. My suggestion would be to consider in your research also some of these aspects, especially because leaders think for the future which is not a simple extrapolation of the present, and they should be able to implement changes which means to influence people by stimulating their emotional brain.

I found very usefully from that perspective the following excellent books:

Daniel Kahneman (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Girous, New York. Daniel Kahneman is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Chip Heath & Dan Heath (2013). Decisive: How to make better choices in life and work. Crown Business, New York.

Wishing you a lot of inspiration and good luck for your research!

Some say that good decisions are those that revealed themselves as such afterwards...

In any domain (corporate, politicis, etc.) there are so many variables to control that it is impossible to measure a good ex-ante decision or decisor. Provided that that decisor is honest, he must be aware of flaws of his decision processes. So I suggest to anchor or strongly include to the Kahneman, Tversky school and all further researchers on neuroeconomics/psychology of decisions.  

Karen, 

There is an interesting view of paradigms, decision,-making and praxis in Ethical  leadership and the Community College (Nevarez & Wood, 2014).

The authors include four inventories to explore which theory of Ethics inspires the decision maker. This lense can help you in your research.

Interesting research. Best wishes.

Gema L Gorosave

Hi Karen,

I found the work of Staford Beer quite useful in approaching your subject of interest. I would suggest you have a look at his 'Cybernetics and Management' as well as 'Decision and Control'.

Very Best,

Ioannis

 Hi Constantin,

You raise a very good point regarding the potential complexity of the topic. It is cause for further reflexivity to hone the problem statement and scope. Your assessment  regarding the nature, nurture aspects of leader characteristics provides further food for thought. I look forward to reviewing the books you recommend.

Thank you for your comments,

Karen

 Yes - I wholeheartedly agree about Stafford Beer model - I will look at how to incorporate into the research.

Thanks,

Karen

 Karen:This RG link on the tab above for local government might be helpful for you as I have not done research in this area myself:

https://www.researchgate.net/topic/local_government

However, what I do notice about officers in our government ministries is that when the going gets tuff, they ask all the hard questions about how to solve the problem but rarely come up with any themselves. On the contrary they appear to be ignorant as to how to solve the problem that they are tasked with solving.

many thanks,

Debra

 Hi Deborah,

Appreciate the link. It's unfortunate that some leaders fail to actively participate in creating solutions to workplace challenges. yet as you indicate, continue to ask others to solve issues. The piece I also have experience is the lack of accountability among such leaders, they demand of others what they are not willing to take on themselves. Not all leaders are like this - thank goodness . I'm especially interested in how leaders operate under crises or extreme duress. 

Cheers,

Karen

Great leaders understand how to balance emotion with reason and make decisions that positively impact themselves, their employees, their customers and stakeholders, and their organizations. When we think of what makes someone a great leader, one characteristic that comes to mind is decisiveness.