Chapter Four — A profile of senior leaders in Australian organisations
Senior leaders play an influential role in an organisation’s future. Yet the international research indicates that many individuals fail to make the transition from operational to senior leadership roles.
Demographic profile of senior leaders
SAL differentiates between leaders working at three levels of the organisation: the organisation level, the workplace level, and the frontline level. This chapter focuses on senior leaders and workplace leaders, who completed different, but matched, surveys.
The two surveys asked questions relevant to their differing role as leaders. For senior leaders, the survey focused on:
· Assessing the external environment.
· Challenges and competitive pressures.
· External constraints faced in meeting these challenges.
· Sources of strategic advice.
· Organisational capabilities to respond to the pressures and challenges that the organisation faced.
Workplace leaders were asked, by contrast, to provide an assessment of:
· Internal capabilities of the organisation to operate effectively.
· Their own capabilities to lead the workplace operation.
At both levels, senior leaders assessed their leadership self-efficacy — or belief in their own ability to lead.
These two surveys also collected demographic information about leaders and characteristics of the organisation and the workplace. In this chapter, a summary profile of senior leaders and workplace leaders is presented. These leaders are categorised into three groups:
· Individuals leading more complex, multi-site organisations (‘senior leaders — multi-site organisations’).
· Individuals leading single-site organisations (‘senior leaders — single site organisations’).
· Individuals engaged in senior leadership roles at the workplace level in multi-site organisations (‘workplace leaders’).
The starting point is to understand the basic demographic characteristics of these leaders.
This analysis assesses whether senior and workplace leaders’ characteristics are common across all organisations, or whether their profiles vary by industry, organisation size, and other characteristics.
