Systematic Literature Review

From the systematic literature review, using thematic analysis, there were glaring findings. As explained in the previous chapter on literature review (Pages 39 to 89), systematic literature review is the organised review of various journal articles and other related literature (Tranfeld et all, 2003; Karim & Rahman, 2017; Mariani et al, 2018).

 

In this analysis, four rounds of literature reviews were conducted. See Table 2. The first was that of taking the 100 related journal articles, newspaper clippings, and other written materials from EBSCOHost, an e-library which is among the most referred to sources of such resource materials. An arbitrary decision to select only those resource materials covering a little over the past two decades to explore the most recent as possible. The groupings of most recent resource materials were well indicated in the review of related literature of this study. Then, the 100 related literature were rated using a scale of 1 through 5, with 5 being the most related as perceived based on the themes of this study. To zero-in on a deeper analysis, those literature that had the rating of 5 on the scale were shortlisted, resulting in 34 journal articles and other literature adjudged closest to this dissertation’s themes.

 

Table 2: Iterations on Word Frequency Queries

Number of Reviewed Literature

Iterations

Number of Top Words

100 related literature

4-letter word length

top 50 word frequency

100 related literature

16-letter word length

top 50 word frequency

34 related literature

4-letter word length

top 50 word frequency

34 related literature

16-letter word length

top 50 word frequency

 

Further to these two stages, a single iteration was exercised for the 100 related literature and the ensuing 34 related literature. The difference between the first iteration and the second was that in the first, in executing the top 50-word query and  the corresponding word clouds, the minimum length was only 4 letters, whereas on the second iteration, the 16-letter minimum length query was executed. This was done to highlight a deeper word query because words that relate to theoretical matters tend to be longer, as concepts are termed more complex than mere facts. True enough, this observation was confirmed as is explained in the succeeding discourse.

 

Thanks to digital instruments that interpret qualitative data like NVivo, word frequency tables and world clouds are possible. NVivo is a software used to analyse qualitative text, voice, and a wide range of literature. Word frequency is the number of times a word appears in a text being analysed or mined.  World cloud is a visual translation of a text’s word frequency however provides a deeper meaning by using colours and font sizes.

 

 

 

Round One: 100 Related Literature (4-Letter Word Length)

Using NVivo, a query was done for the software to list a word frequency. In this first iteration, the calibration used was (1) using stemmed words instead of exact words only; (2) minimum word length was 4 letters; and (3) top 50 words. Only the Top 50 words were observed to be most relevant to the study as the words that succeeded were either not frequently mentioned in the texts or irrelevant once like articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and the like.

 

From the word frequency table listing the most mentioned, albeit written, words in descending order from most frequently mentioned to the least (Table 3), "leadership” with its stemmed words, “leaders,” “leading,” and the rest of the words rooted from “lead”, generated the highest frequency of 16.91% among the top 50 words. This was followed by the word, “organizing” including the stemmed word, “organizationally,” “organizing,” and so on, with 7.34% proportion of the whole lot.  The word “management” and its stemmed words followed with 5.56%. This confirms that the journal articles, the relevant newspaper articles, and other research materials were chosen correctly to suit this present study about management and leadership styles related to my consulting work.

 

 

 

Table 3: Word Frequency on 100 Related Literature 4-Letter Word Length

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1

leadership / leaders

48,566

16.91%

24

valuing

4,288

1.49%

2

management

15,959

5.56%

25

individuals

4,250

1.48%

3

organizing

13,095

4.56%

26

cultures

4,204

1.46%

4

studying

9,541

3.32%

27

results

4,147

1.44%

5

researching

9,525

3.32%

28

levels

4,134

1.44%

6

organization

7,974

2.78%

29

busy

4,066

1.42%

7

models

7,735

2.69%

30

theory

3,926

1.37%

8

changing

7,394

2.57%

31

processing

3,871

1.35%

9

effects

6,586

2.29%

32

learning

3,788

1.32%

10

transforms

6,569

2.29%

33

works

3,573

1.24%

11

permission

6,209

2.16%

34

informs

3,514

1.22%

12

style

5,841

2.03%

35

data

3,475

1.21%

13

using

5,806

2.02%

36

journals

3,415

1.19%

14

behaviour

5,774

2.01%

37

sharing

3,412

1.19%

15

performs

5,614

1.95%

38

differs

3,199

1.11%

16

knowledgeable

5,538

1.93%

39

copyright

3,169

1.10%

17

employees

5,453

1.90%

40

owner

3,097

1.08%

18

development

5,393

1.88%

41

reproduction

6,114

2.13%

19

follows

5,012

1.74%

42

questions

3,044

1.06%

20

projects

4,984

1.74%

43

prohibits

3,033

1.06%

21

teams

4,883

1.70%

44

providing

3,027

1.05%

22

relationships

4,568

1.59%

45

new

3,003

1.05%

23

participative

4,473

1.56%

46

significant

2,992

1.04%

Total

287,233

100.00%

 

The words, “studying” and “researching” followed suit with an overall proportion of 3.32% each. These words appeared to be frequently mentioned in the texts of all the 100 related literature as those linked with the themes of leadership and management. The words, “changing,” “effects,” “transforms,” “permission,” “style,” “using,” “behaviour,” “performs,” “knowledgeable,” “employees,” “development,” “follows,” “projects,” teams,” “relationships,” participative,” “valuing,” “individuals,” “cultures,” “results,” “levels,” “ busy,” “theory,” “ processing,” “learning,” “works,” “data,” “sharing” and others, along with their stemmed words, came after “studying” and “researching” with proportions ranging from 1.19% up to 2.57%, respectively.  It is not a surprise that these words and their meanings are relevant to the theory and practice of management as well as leadership.

 

Other words among the 50 top ones are the least significant to the topics of leadership and management, yet they connect with the latter in some ways. At the bottom of the list are “owner,” “reproduction,” “questions,” “providing,” “new,” and finally, “significant”. These have from 1.04% up to 1.08% relative frequencies, respectively. See Table 3 above.

 

The word cloud (Figure 3) indicates “leadership” as the most frequently written word in the 100 related literature. The colours that indicated the degree of association among the words revealed that the word, “organizationally” has the strongest association with “leadership”. The other words that associated with the term, “leadership,” at a slightly lesser degree of kinship are “relationships,” “performs,” “individuals,” and “levels.” The words, “cultures,” “employees,” “results,” “busy,” “owner,” “theory,” “processing,” “prohibits,” and “ones” have the least degree of connection with but are still considered to be associated with the word, “leadership”.

 

 

Figure 3: Word Cloud on 100 Related Literature

 

 

Second to “leadership” as the most frequently written word in the 100 related literature under this first iteration is the word, “management”. The word, “leaders,” surprisingly appeared as to have the strongest association with the word, “management,” and had seemingly separted as a stemmed word of the lot’s most frequent word, “leadership”. This was followed by “researching,” “studying,” and “permission”.  At a slightly lesser degree of association to “management” are “valuing,” “projects,” “learning,” “participative,” “follows,” “questions,” “informs,” and “providing”. The words, “reproduce” and “journals” do not seem to have any relevance to the term, “leadership” but appeared in the same colour as the slightly lesser degree of associated words.

 

The third and last most significant word indicated in the word cloud is “organizing”. The closest associated terms to this are “effects,” “models,” “changing,” and “transforms”.  The slightly lesser associated words that follow are “development,” “behaviours,” “knowledgeable,” “sharing,” “teams,” “reproduction,” “new,” “differs,” “works,” “data,” “using,” and “significant,”. The least relevant among the least most frequently mentioned word among the top 50 words is “copyright” which appears to be an outlier in meaning.

 

From both the word frequency table and the word cloud under this iteration of 100 related literature calibrated with stemmed words, 4-letter words, and top 50 most frequent words it could be gleaned that the related literature are strong in mentioning and discussing about “leadership,” “management,” and “organizing”. The terms, “researching” and “studying” also appeared quite strong in so far as the hierarchy of most frequently mentioned words in all the 100 related literature is concerned.

 

Round Two: 100 Related Literature (16-Letter Word Length)

A second word frequency query was done using NVivo.  In this second iteration, the set of calibration used consisted of (1) with stemmed words instead of exact words only; (2) minimum word length was 16 letters; and (3) top 40 words only. The original aim was to list the Top 50 words; however, consolidating similar words that stemmed out of the main meaning of the ones on top of the list, I found it convenient to shortlist to a good 40 topmost frequently mentioned.

 

From the word frequency table listing the most mentioned, words in descending order from most frequently mentioned to the least (Table 4), "transformational” and its stemmed words, generated the highest frequency of 80.89% among the Top 40 words. This was followed by the word, “responsibilities” with 4.07% relative frequency based on the total lot.  The word “conceptualization” and its stemmed words followed with 1.47%.

 

The other words that followed have relative frequencies that vary from 0.09% to 1.47%, namely: “conceptualization,” “entrepreneurship,” “operationalization,” “internationalization,” “institutionalizing,” “organizational,” “decentralization,” “interdisciplinary,” “multidimensional,” “conscientiousness,” “argumentativeness,” “misunderstanding,” “knowledge sharing,” “servant leadership,” “enthusiastically,” “ interconnectedness,” “unpredictability,” “counterproductive,” “relationship,” “interdependencies,” “overcommunication,” and the like. All of these words are terms that relate to leadership and management. They confirm that the journal articles, the relevant newspaper articles, and other research materials were appropriate this present study about management and leadership styles related to my consulting work.

 

 

 

See Table 4 that follows, the word frequency on 100 related literature at 16-letter word length.

 

Table 4: Word Frequency on 100 Related Literature 16-Letter Word Length

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

1

transformational

5,665

80.89%

21

misunderstanding

16

0.23%

2

responsibilities

285

4.07%

22

multicollinearity

16

0.23%

3

conceptualization

103

1.47%

23

nonparticipation

15

0.21%

4

phenomenological

102

1.46%

24

comprehensiveness

13

0.19%

5

generalizability

83

1.19%

25

knowledge sharing

13

0.19%

6

entrepreneurship

77

1.10%

26

servant leadership

12

0.17%

7

operationalization

62

0.89%

27

enthusiastically

11

0.16%

8

interrelationships

55

0.79%

28

homoscedasticity

11

0.16%

9

internationalization

51

0.73%

29

interconnectedness

11

0.16%

10

institutionalizing

38

0.54%

30

uncharacteristic

11

0.16%

11

organizational

38

0.54%

31

unpredictability

11

0.16%

12

decentralization

37

0.53%

32

counterproductive

11

0.16%

13

interdisciplinary

35

0.50%

33

relationship

10

0.14%

14

multidimensional

32

0.46%

34

characterization

9

0.13%

15

telecommunications

25

0.36%

35

interdependencies

9

0.13%

16

intercorrelations

24

0.34%

36

overcommunication

9

0.13%

17

acknowledgements

23

0.33%

37

multidisciplinary

8

0.11%

18

conscientiousness

21

0.30%

38

generalisability

7

0.10%

19

argumentativeness

17

0.24%

39

multidirectional

6

0.09%

20

conceptualisation

16

0.23%

40

autobiographical

5

0.07%

Total

7,003

100.00%

 

Below is the corresponding word cloud indicating that indicated “transformational” as the most frequently written word in the 100 related literature. This confirms the results observed in the above word frequency table (Table 4). The less pronounced words, e.g., smaller font-sized, but of similar colours that indicated the degree of association among the words revealed the words to be closely associated with “transformational” are “interrelationships,” “relationship-oriented,” “multidirectional,” “responsibilities,” “ conscientiousness,” “enthusiastically,” multicollinearity,” and even “misunderstanding,” “counterproductive,” and “argumentativeness.” This apparently indicates that transformational leadership opens up to interaction among stakeholders in organizations as well as the possible conflicts and issues perhaps brought about by such type of leadership.

 

The other words that are associated among themselves as they bear the same colour and shades are “organizational” “operationalization,” “operationalization ability,” “generalisability,” “internationalization,” “interdependencies” “uncharacteristic,” “interconnectedness,” “servant leadership,” “overcommunication,” and “person organization.” The words, “entrepreneurship,” “conceptualization,” “telecommunications,” “decentralization,” “interdisciplinary,” “institutionalizing,” “comprehensiveness,” “phenomenological,” “characterization,” “knowledge sharing,” “acknowledgements,” “intercorrelations,” “nonparticipation,”  and “conceptualization” is the third group with kinship with each other.

 

Figure 6: Word Cloud on 100 Related Literature

 

 

From both the word frequency table and the word cloud under this iteration of 100 related literature calibrated with stemmed words, 16-letter words, and top 40 most frequent words it could be gleaned that the related literature mentioned and discussed about “transformational,” to be the most prominent of all the words. This is followed by those related to “organization,” and “entrepreneurship”.  The literature, therefore, confirm the similar concepts within the leadership and management realm.

 

Round Three: 34 Related Literature (4-Letter Word Length)

The third iteration of word frequency query was done again using NVivo. In this iteration, the calibration used was (1) with stemmed words instead of exact words only; (2) minimum word length was 4 letters; and (3) top 41 words only. The 41 top words was the result of grouping together very similar terms from the original Top 50 most frequent words from the derived word frequency. The difference of this round from the first two iteration is that the processes – word frequency and world cloud – were conducted on the shortlisted 34 literature. To recall from earlier discussions, this shortlist was necessary to further extract the study references that were rated 5 on the scale of 1 through 5 where 5 was the closes to the this present study. This was done to obtain a more reliable and stronger set of related literature akin to the topics of modern leadership and management, the main themes of this present research.

 

From the word frequency table listing the most mentioned words in descending order from most frequently mentioned to the least (Table 5), "leadership” with its stemmed word “leaders” indicated the highest frequency of 17.60% of the total frequency among the top 41 words. This was followed by the word, “organizing” including the stemmed word, “organization,” with 8.12% relative to the whole lot of 41 words.  The word “management” and its stemmed words followed with 5.09%. This confirms that the journal articles, the relevant newspaper articles, and other research materials were chosen correctly to suit this present study about management and leadership styles related to my consulting work. It was also noticed that these top words were not so different from the previous two iterations although they were calibrated in other ways, e.g., 100 instead of only 34 related literature that were reviewed.

 

The words, “transforms” and “studying” followed with an overall proportion of 5.09% and 3.71%, respectively. These words appeared to be frequently mentioned in the texts of all the 34 related literature as those linked with the themes of leadership and management. The words, “knowledge,” “researching,” “project,” “learning,” “follows,” “model,” “effects,” “culture,” “relationship,” “values,” “behaviour,” “teams,” “permission,” “style,” “develop,” “using,” “performance,” “sharing,” “informs,” “individuals,” “significant,” “transactive,” “theory,” “employees,” “success,” “results,” “participation,” “measuring,” “correlations,” “practices,” “works,” “influence,” “data,” “groups,” “support,” and “Bass” along with their stemmed words, came after “transforms” and “studying” with relative frequencies ranging from 1.03% up to 3.39%, respectively.  These words and their meanings are consistent with the words most frequently mentioned in the two previous word frequency iterations. They are very relevant to the theory and practice of management as well as leadership.

 

 

 

 

Table 5: Word Frequency on 34 Related Literature 4-Letter Word Length

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

Rank

 Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

 

 

 

 

 

 

1

leadership / leaders

17,255

17.60%

22

performance

1,615

1.65%

2

organizing/organization

 7,962

8.12%

23

sharing

1,610

1.64%

3

management   

 4,987

5.09%

24

informs

1,403

1.43%

4

transforms

3,641

3.71%

25

individuals

1,362

1.39%

5

studying

3,396

3.46%

26

significant

1,324

1.35%

6

knowledge

3,328

3.39%

27

transactive

1,305

1.33%

7

researching

2,962

3.02%

28

theory

1,284

1.31%

8

project

2,791

2.85%

29

employees

1,268

1.29%

9

learning

2,542

2.59%

30

success

1,229

1.25%

10

follows

2,366

2.41%

31

results

1,193

1.22%

11

model

2,189

2.23%

32

participation

1,136

1.16%

12

effects

2,167

2.21%

33

measuring

1,093

1.11%

13

culture

2,126

2.17%

34

correlations

1,082

1.10%

14

relationship

3,147

3.21%

35

practices

1,052

1.07%

15

values

2,058

2.10%

36

works

1,051

1.07%

16

behavior

2,010

2.05%

37

influence

1,040

1.06%

17

teams

1,953

1.99%

38

data

1,025

1.05%

18

permission

1,864

1.90%

39

groups

1,019

1.04%

19

style

1,818

1.85%

40

support

1,010

1.03%

20

develop

1,693

1.73%

41

Bass'

1,005

1.03%

21

using

1,687

1.72%

 

Total

98,048

100.00%

 

The word cloud below indicates “leadership” as the most frequently written word in the 34 shortlisted related literature. This is the same most frequently written word as those in 100 related literature analysed in the first iteration. The colours that indicate the degree of association among the words revealed that the words, “management” has the strongest association with “leadership”. Check the size of the word and its strikingly the same colour as that of “leadership.” The other word that associated with the term “leadership” but at a slightly lesser degree of kinship, e.g., smaller font size, is “studying.” This word stood alone in its size of the same colour shade as “leadership” and management. This apparently indicates that studying is a trait akin to the practice of leadership and management, at least according to the 34 shortlisted literature that had been reviewed.

 

 

 

Figure 7: Word Cloud on 100 Related Literature

 

 

Another word that stood alone in the word cloud with a smaller font size and having the same colour shade as “studying” is the word “model.” This indicates that this word which is important in the concepts of leadership and management takes a specific place in the realm. It is specific in the sense that it is either one of the strongest well-spoken of in the literature reviewed or one of the less talked about.

 

There are other words that are of the same colour in within the realm of “leadership” and “management.” The shade is uniformly lightest within this colour scheme and the font size is the smallest as well. These assumed akin words are “employees,” “individuals,” “teams,” “sharing,” “practices,” “correlations,” “journals,” “permission,” “transactive,” “data,” “support,” and “Bass’.” These words that are still among the Top 41 most frequently mentioned ones in the 34 shortlisted reviewed literature though the least are still considered significant in the study of leadership and management.

 

From both the word frequency table and the word cloud under this iteration of 34 related literature calibrated with stemmed words, 4-letter words, and top 41 most frequent words, it could be surmised that the related literature are strong in mentioning and discussing about “leadership,” “management,” and “studying”. The other concept that had a good place in the lot is the term “model” somehow indicating that the concept of modelling is important in the study of leadership and management. The last bunch of most frequently mentioned words in the 34 shortlisted reviewed literature showed certain relevance to the themes. In other words they are generally not out of place in this present study.

 

Round Four: 34 Related Literature (16-Letter Word Length)

The last iteration in this systematic literature review process had the following calibration used, namely: (1) with stemmed words instead of exact words only; (2) minimum word length was 16 letters; and (3) Top 32 words which were originally aimed at Top 50 words just like those in the previous three iterations. From the 50 top words frequently written in the selected 34 literature, stemmed words were grouped together resulting in only 32.

 

NVivo was the software used in doing the systematic literature review, to check for the word frequency and word cloud to interpret the data, i.e., the 34 shortlisted literature review for the purpose of this study.  Recall that the 34 were those that were rated 5 in the 5-point Likert scale where 5 ratings were the closest to the study of this research’s theme on leadership and management.

 

Following is the table lists the most mentioned, words in descending order from most frequently mentioned to the least mentioned (Table 6). In this iteration, “transformation” with its stemmed words, has the highest, in fact predominantly high, relative frequency of 88.46% among the top 32 words. This relative frequency is way higher than the next word that followed, “responsibilities” that generated a miniscule 1.83% of the total frequency. This indicates that the reviewed literature was very emphatic on transformation that stems into the word “transformational,” the leadership type that is described as consultative, participative, interactive, open, and more freedom given by the leader to organizational participants (Cobert, 2004; Janis, 2004; Kim, 2011; Rijal, 2010).

 

This next group of words most frequent consist of the following: “internationalization,” “conceptualization,” “entrepreneurship,” “operationalization,” “interconnections,” “interdisciplinary,” “generalizability,” “institutionalizing,” “knowledge sharing,” “telecommunications,” “multicollinearity,” “servant leadership,” “conscientiousness,” and “organization,” including their respective stemmed words, in this order from most frequent to the least. The relative frequencies range from 1.29% down to 0.26% of the whole lot of 32 words. This batch of words confirms that the journal articles, the relevant newspaper articles, and other research materials were chosen correctly to suit this present study about management and leadership styles related to my consulting work.

 

 

 

Table 6: Word Frequency on 34 Related Literature 16-Letter Word Length

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

 Rel Freq

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

 Rel Freq

1

transformation

3,425

88.46%

17

multidimensional

10

0.26%

2

responsibilities

71

1.83%

18

homoscedasticity

10

0.26%

3

internationalization

50

1.29%

19

conceptualization

7

0.18%

4

conceptualization

37

0.96%

20

personalization

6

0.15%

5

entrepreneurship

29

0.75%

21

enthusiastically

5

0.13%

6

operationalization

27

0.70%

22

characterization

4

0.10%

7

interconnections

41

1.06%

23

commercialization

3

0.08%

8

interdisciplinary

27

0.70%

24

understandability

3

0.08%

9

generalizability

17

0.44%

25

unsuccessfulness

3

0.08%

10

institutionalizing

13

0.34%

26

business perspective

2

0.05%

11

knowledge sharing

13

0.34%

27

demand

2

0.05%

12

telecommunications

12

0.31%

28

knowledge support

2

0.05%

13

multicollinearity

12

0.31%

29

misunderstanding

2

0.05%

14

servant leadership

12

0.31%

30

multigenerational

2

0.05%

15

conscientiousness

11

0.28%

31

research

2

0.05%

16

organization

10

0.26%

32

selection

2

0.05%

Total

3,872

100.0%

 

 

The last set of words and their stems had relative frequencies ranging from 0.26% down to as small as 0.05% of the total lot. The words are “multidimensional,” “conceptualization,” “personalization,” “enthusiastically,” “characterization,” “commercialization,” “understandability,” “unsuccessfulness,” “business perspective,” “demand,” “knowledge support,” “misunderstanding,” “multigenerational,” “research,” and “selection,” in that order. These words appeared to be frequently mentioned in the texts of the 34 related literature as those linked with the themes of leadership and management. It was observed that these word frequency sets did not differ much from those that were discussed under Iteration Number 2, i.e., with 100 reviewed related literature with 16-letter word length. These words and their meanings are relevant to the theory and practice of management as well as leadership styles.

 

The word cloud below corresponds to the word frequency above; however, it reveals additional insights on how the 34 reviewed related literature figured in terms of 32 top most frequent words. Similar to Iteration Number 2, the 100 reviewed related literature with the same 16-letter word lengths, this iteration indicated “transformational” as the most frequently written word. This confirms the results observed in the above word frequency table (Table 6).

 

The less prominent words, e.g., smaller font-sized, but of similar colour that indicate the degree of association among the words revealed these words to be closely associated with “transformational.” These are “selection attrition,” “unsuccessfulness,” “commercialization,” “operationalizations,” “responsibilities,” “interconnections,” “servant leadership,” “internationalization,” “intercorrelations,” “knowledge sharing,” “contextualization,” and “knowledge supporting.” These words are very different from those reported earlier in the 16-letter word length category although admittedly these words still fall within the realm of the management and leadership themes, fitting to be covered within the turf of “transformational” leadership. Thus, the similarity that this iteration has over Iteration Number 2 is that this indicates that transformational leadership opens up to interaction among stakeholders in organizations brought about by such type of leadership. See Table 6 again.

 

The word cloud in Figure 8 indicates “transformational” as the most frequently written word in the 34 related literature. The colours that indicate the degree of association among the words revealed that the words that had closest association with this word were:  “operationalizations,” “responsibilities,” “interconnections,” “contextualization,” “knowledge supporting,” “selection attrition,” “servant leadership,” “internationalization,” “intercorrelations,” “knowledge sharing,” “commercialization,” and “unsuccessfulness”.

 

The next batch of words that did not seem to have any association with “transformational” but were related to each other, that is, with the same blue colour shade were “business perspectives,” “conscientiousness,” “telecommunications,” “person organization,” “multigenerational,” “understandability,” “concepatualization,” and “internalisation.” The batch of words that had the same lighter shade of blue were “interdependencies,” “phenomenological,” “interdisciplinary,” and “characterization.” The last batch but not necessarily the least superior in terms of ranking compared with the first three batches had the white colour. The words with the same association were “entrepreneurship,” “reconceptualizing,” “demand abilities,” “generalisability,” enthusiastically,” “multicollinearity,” “institutionalizing,” “organizationally,” “enthusiastically,” “multidisciplinary,” and “acknowledgements.”

 

 

 

 

Figure 8: Word Cloud on 100 Related Literature

 

 

From both the word frequency table and the word cloud under this iteration of 34related literature calibrated with stemmed words, 16-letter words, and top 32 most frequent words it could be gleaned that the related literature are strong in mentioning and discussing about “transformational leadership,” “organization,” and “entrepreneurship”.  

 

 

 

Sentiment Analysis of Past Interviews

A qualitative questionnaire of past clients’ employees that I floated way back 2015 when I first started my dissertation. The purpose was to investigate the management and leadership environment I created in handling my consulting projects at that time. The 15 respondents were the staff of my clients that I considered as colleagues as they were working within the scope of my consultancy jobs. I positioned the survey treating the respondents as my “co-researchers” hoping to elicit responses that were transparent and candid as much as they could. The following introductory letter was included in that written, self-administered, qualitative survey and was given individually to my colleague respondents:

 

“Dear __________ (respondent’s nickname),

 

“I am seeking your help in an interesting survey. I am now conducting research for my thesis on how we make meaning together in an organisational setting, including the influences of macro-culture and the nuances of the micro, local communities within which we work. I would appreciate your assistance by answering the four questions in this survey, in any manner you deem fit.

 

“There is no proposition that I am looking for to ascertain, verify or dispute. You need only to document these discussions in point form (fortunately, for you, I am the one writing the thesis and not you!).”

 

A sentiment analysis of this past survey was conducted on the text responses of the subjects (Appendix B). In doing this, responses were treated for with themes or common topic areas related to how I worked with these client-colleagues of mine within the realms of organisational culture and co-working leadership styles I employed. Online software was utilised to extract the themes from frequencies of words as well as their corresponding word clouds. These tools were text analyser to derive the word frequencies and word cloud creator to derive the word clouds.

 

All the responses from the subjects were treated with the word frequency instrument. It indicated that “culture” and its stemmed words was the most common word. It had relative frequency of 8.41% comparative to the 40 top words in the word frequency table (Table 7, Page 172). This was the highest word frequency in the list. This was expected as the questionnaire specifically asked about how culture affected the respondents as individuals and as working with teams.  “Work” appeared to have emerged to be the second highest in the ranking, with 7.40% proportion. A batch of words with the range from 5.38% to 5.63% followed quite far from “work.” These were “ideas” with its stemmed and synonymous words like “views” and “opinions” put together; “Singapore,” and “female.”

 

The next batch with relative frequencies ranging from 4.04% to 4.71% were “people,” “want/need,” “think,” and “different.” The batch of words that followed ranged from 3.20% to 3.78% of relative frequencies in the word ranking. They were “male,” “time,” “good/well/better,” “discussion,” and “values” in that descending order.

 

 

 

 

Table 7: Top 40 Most Frequent and Relevant words Older Interviews

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

Rank

Word with stems

Freq

Rel Freq

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1

culture / cultural

100

8.41%

20

understand / ing

25

2.10%

2

work

88

7.40%

21

company

23

1.93%

3

ideas / views / opinions

67

5.63%

22

team

16

1.35%

4

singapore

65

5.47%

23

participants

15

1.26%

5

female

64

5.38%

24

respect

14

1.18%

6

people

56

4.71%

25

management

14

1.18%

7

want / need

55

4.63%

26

colleagues

13

1.09%

8

think

53

4.46%

27

change

13

1.09%

9

different

48

4.04%

28

together

12

1.01%

10

male

45

3.78%

29

environment

12

1.01%

11

time / times

41

3.45%

30

teacher

11

0.93%

12

good / well / better

41

3.45%

31

model

10

0.84%

13

discussion

39

3.28%

32

clients

10

0.84%

14

values / important

38

3.20%

33

bring

10

0.84%

15

open / learn

34

2.86%

34

style

9

0.76%

16

organisation

34

2.86%

35

senior

9

0.76%

17

way / approach

33

2.78%

36

reflection

9

0.76%

18

staff

28

2.35%

37

process

9

0.76%

19

feel

26

2.19%

 

Total

 1,189

100.00%

 

 

“Open/learn,” “organisation,” “way/approach,” “staff,” “feel,” and “understand” came next with relative frequencies ranging from 2.10% to 2.86% in the ranking. A lot of words followed this batch with relative frequencies from 1.01% to 1.93%. These were “company,” “team,” “participants,” “respect,” “management,” “colleagues,” “change,” “together,” and “environment” in that descending order. Finally, the last batch of words with relative frequencies ranging from as low as 0.76% up to 0.93% were “teacher,” “model,” “clients,” “bring,” “style,” “senior,” “reflection,” and “process.” The non-relevant articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and the like were excluded from the list. See Table 7 earlier for the these details.

 

 

The word cloud shows in Figure 9 below that “Singapore,”  “culture,” “work,” “different,” “people,” “females,” “ideas,” “think,” “staff” and “others” are the most prominent words but of different colours. “Singapore” and “culture” came out because the first question in the survey asked about how the Singapore culture affected the way the respondents worked with me in the various projects at that time. The city state created an impact on them as does many Singaporeans feel. However, the word had not been associated with many words besides “life” and “also.” The former word logically linked with “Singapore” but the latter did not make much sense in the context of the past study. On the other hand, the word “culture” that came out of the same font size as “Singapore” seemed to have more word associations. They were “lead,” “well,” “equal,” and “efficient.”  These words seem to indicate the influence of the word “culture” in the way the respondents observed the work environment, apparently with a leadership style that was “well” with the recognition that we were co-partners in the tasks that were at hand, thus creating results that were “efficient.”

 

Another bunch of words appear prominent and looked closely linked with the word, “work.” This were “way,” “top,” and “want. Smaller font sized words of the same colour hue were “came” and “wide.”  The prominent word “different” is also associated with “just,” “hard,” and with slightly smaller font sized “used,” “go,” “quite,” and “delve.”

 

Figure 9: Word Cloud of Top 40 Most Frequent and Relevant Words Past Interviews

 

 

“People” is also another equally prominent word as “Singapore,” “culture,” and “word” with the words seemingly associated, with smaller font size, “long,” “bond,” and “multi,” as well as words that were even a lot smaller and with lighter colour shade, “dialect,”  “mum,” and “self” as well as the negative word, “evil.”

 

The colour shade that indicated the degree of association among the words revealed that “females” that had closest association with “contributions,” “health,” and “two.” The word “female” was prominent as many of the respondents, mostly male, expressed that the projects they were working on was dominated by females. These projects were training and education related.

 

The next batch of words that seem to have words associated with it was “ideas.” The other words with the same light green colour shade are “discussion,” “first,” “good,” “law,” “area,” and “love”. The negative words “bad” and “leave” seem to associate with “ideas“, too. “Think” also came out with the same prominence as the words highlighted earlier. With the same colour hue that seem  to link with it are “fully,” “network,” “mixture,” “measure,” “ultracasual,” and “developing.” 

 

“Staff” associated words include  “may,” and “set.“ The word “others” have words linked with it. These words are “like,” “talk,” “try,” “saying,” “sense,” “identity,” “drive,” “pay,” “significant,” and “network.”  Yet, other less prominent words seem  to associate  with each other. The word “things” link  with the similar colour shaded words, “mix,” “open,” “focus” and with the lighter hue words, “get,” “can’t” “lot,” “ipoem,” “establish,” “binded,” and “paced.”

 

“Look” and “job” are of the same colour hue and appear associated with “sex” and “side.”  The word “style” seem to associate  with “one” and “now.” The word “free,” “time,” and “current” seem  associated with each other. “Views” came out prominent and seemed to associated with the word “topic.”

 

The word frequency table and the word cloud that were used to analyse the old survey produced consistent words that referred to a corporate culture led with openness to ideas, people-orientation, managed knowledge, free information, and efficiency.

 

Sentiment Analysis of Recent Interviews

This section discusses findings from the sentiment analysis on interviews conducted among nine directors, managers and staff involved in three new projects under the umbrella of the CEO’s leadership and management style. As discussed in the earlier section of this study, the framework within which this leadership and management style had drastically evolve in time.  This is thus the appropriate time to compare the earlier from of this style to the present.  Having mentioned this purpose, this study utilized sentiment analysis to sift through the volume of text from more than four hours and close to five hours of recorded interviews.

 

Gupta (2018) argued that the “contextual mining of text which identifies and extracts subjective information in source material and helping a business to understand the social sentiment of their brand, product or service which monitoring online conversation.”  Lexalytics (2020) described this method of interpreting qualitative data as this involves a combination of machine learning approach and NLP or natural language processing.  The aim is to assign a form of quantitative accounting of opinion, feelings, albeit sentiments, on objects that Gupta (2018) stated earlier.  At times, third-party analysis is tapped to conduct such analysis using certain algorithms for deeper text mining (Lexalytics.com, Sentiment analysis explained). Symeopidis (2018) agrees to these definitions and agrees to these definitions and further emphasized three sentiment outcomes that include negative, neutral, and positive opinions. These responses are mostly directed to customer service which point to opinions on certain styles or models such as what this present student attempted to investigate.

 

This study used R-programming in producing word maps from the interview texts sourced from nine different subjects. I later interpreted and analysed the outcomes using the techniques in sentiment analysis. Specifically, using R-programming, the following procedure was undertaken, resulting in eight separate word maps.

1. The interviews were conducted individually adapting a semi-structured instrument. See Appendix B for the structured questions used in the interviews. Probing questions were also resorted to draw opinions in the most exhaustive manner possible. These interviews were recorded using a mobile voice recorder.

2. The audio recordings were then transcribed into texts, producing nine separate MS Word text files, ready for analysis.

3. The text transcriptions were then combined into one CSV (comma-separated values) database file that in turn was uploaded into the R code. See Appendix C for the complete R-programming codes.

4. R read the survey responses and converted them into a corpus or a collection of text.

5. The corpus was then converted into a data frame.“A data frame is a table or a two-dimensional array-like structure in which each column contains values of one variable and each row contains a set of values from each column” (Tutorial point. Learning R).

6. A bigram was then created. A bigram is a set of dual words. Its purpose is to analyse word pairs that could reveal some meaning to the text being analysed.

7. Two-word sentiments were visualized. See resulting word maps in Appendix C.

8. To further analyse the text, a deeper level of processing was conducted by creating a trigram that visualized three-word sentiments.

9. Considering that there were three projects in this research composed of three team members per project, thus, three interviewers in each one. Steps from creating the bi-gram to visualizing the three-word sentiments were done.See the resulting word maps in Appendix C.

10. The outcomes of the above procedure using R-programming was then analysed.

 

Table 8: Iterations According to Projects

 Iteration

Project

Version

Number of Interviewees

1

Channel Partnership

Bi-word

3

2

Channel Partnership

Tri-word

3

3

Digital Campus

Bi-word

3

4

Digital Campus

Tri-word

3

5

ERP

Bi-word

3

6

ERP

Tri-word

3

7

Consolidated

Bi-word

9

8

Consolidated

Tri-word

9

 

The results of the R-programming codes were combined with the personal observation and opinions of the interviewer-researcher with the former confirming the latter. The first of two iterations consisted of the bi-word and the tri-word versions. There are four rounds consisting of a bi-word and a tri-word version. The following table, Table 8,  shows the details.

 

Iteration 1: Channel Partnership Team (Bi-word)

Figure 10 that follows displays the word map from the R-programme used to process the qualitative interview data gathered from three members of the channel partnership team. This bi-word version showed “channel partners” as the prevailing phrase. One of the three-word batches with the same colour which is orange and the same font size consist of “style leadership,” “training masters,” “last time,” “business development,” “way things,” “will tell,” “think,” “AIMS project,” “local partner,” “corporate culture,” and “customer service.” 

 

Figure 10: Word Map - Channel Partner (Bi-Word)

 

 

These words have either neutral or positive connotations. Only “don’t want” is the negative phrase.  This batch of words and phrases seem to indicate this team’s consciousness of order and role clarity with the prevalence of “business development,” “AIMS project,” “local partner,” “customer service” link to “leadership,” “management,” and “style.”

 

Another set of phrases which consists of a few words, namely: “one thing,” “along way,” and “make sure.” These phrases are coloured purple and have the same font type and size that could indicate certainty in responsibilities in the project team.” Yet another phrase set in this bi-word iteration includes “environmental services,” “know sometimes,” “partner like,” “next gen,” “get message,” “better way,” “gentle heart,” “go live,” “don’t get,” “like know,” “things want,” “will give,” “still leaving,”

“project director,” “management leadership,” “required partner,” and “people join.”  These consistently emphasize organisation of the team structure, order, leadership, role clarity, and sense of responsibility in the team structure.  No negative word or phrase was occurred in the word map that belong to the batch of phrases all of the green colour and of similar font type and size.

 

Iteration 2: Channel Partnership Team (Tri-word)

In the tri-word version word map for the channel partnership team, it turned out that the result is a single colour and single font characteristic. See the word map in the following figure, Figure 11. Besides those that were generally similar phrases mentioned earlier in the bi-word version, here there are relatively new phrases like “throw back question,” “will tell procedure,” “style uniqueness Palani,” “don’t get chance,” “demand people think,” “next generation team,” “everything go smoothly,” “people around us,” “will coach us,” “don’t look good,” “will give answer,” “like think way,” “difficult get message,” “stuck don’t know,” “suggestions pertaining management,” “one thing learned,” “’m kind person,” “know whether cope,” and “think always.”

 

Figure 11: Word Map - Channel Partner (Tri-Word)

 

 

It is noteworthy to highlight the three negative phrases, “don’t look good,” “difficult get message,” and “stuck don’t know” in this stack of tri-word phrases. To one who did not conduct the interview, these phrases do mean anything at all, but to the interviewer, this mostly positive bunch of phrases seem to describe the type of project team and top management leadership styles this team perceived they were in, one where the members could make suggestions openly, think, and was people-oriented.  The members seemed to associate the mostly positive type of leadership to a favourable team and company culture.

 

Iteration 3: Digital Campus Team (Bi-word)

The next iteration is the visualisation of the qualitative data from interviewing three company manager and staff from another team doing the so-called digital campus project. This data set was also treated with the bi-word as well as tri-word versions using R-programming.  The bi-word word map, or more appropriately, phrase map, which follows highlight the phrase “gentle heart” with a grey colour and the prominent large font size.  Evidently, the team was conscious of this core value that the company management emphasised and was well observed in practice.  A batch of words and phrases in this bi-word iteration consisted of “ways working,” “learn things,” “know people,” “turn left,” “one,” “right,” “one year,” “point view,” “attend classes,” “still encounter,” “turnaround time,” “will work now,” “will tell,” “consider project,” “project right,” “project team,” “take leadership,” and “know team.” This seems to indicate a project team leadership and management style that motivate people to learn, thin, provide opinions, reach for goals, truly implement, and recognise engaged leaders and managers.

 

The next word-phrase group consists of red coloured ones that include “know like,” “level success,” and “sum total.” This batch speaks of the project named, “sum total” that was considered successful. Yet another group coloured light purple was composed of “corporate culture,” “feel like,” “don’t want,” “know,” “support team,” “right now,” “management style,” “tell people,” “lunch time,” “new business,” “let’s say,” “stakeholder,” “turn right,” “don’t think,” and “digital solution.” The negative phrases did not mean any complaints from the team members and were overwhelmed by phrases that seemed to describe corporate culture associated with leadership and management style. These are supportive, knowledge-oriented, learning motivated, and aware of stakeholders’ concerns.

 

Figure 11: Word Map - Digital Campus Project (Bi-Word)

 

 

Iteration 4: Digital Campus Team (Tri-word)

The tri-word word map for this group of interviewees involved in the digital campus project seemed to highlight success, good leadership, and people-oriented management style.  See Figure 12 that follows. The same light orange colour and font size group consisted of the phrases, “want allow people,” “way project managed,” “taking leadership qualities,” “better getting better,” “still encounter familiar,” “management role describe,” “gentle heart,” “work know like,” “email support team,” “success main thing,” “long working project,” “Palani overall CEO,” “English sometimes talk,” “feel like months,” “level success main,” “emphasize gentle hearted,” “Palani say don’t,” “leadership qualities want,” “know gentle heart,” “let’s say new,” “sum total well,” and “like whoever attend.”   

 

 

 

Figure 12: Word Map - Digital Campus Project (Tri-Word)

 

 

There are evidence of the pronounced management influence of the CEO in the conduct of this project although there was no disagreement, resistance, nor feeling of unpleasantness of this management’s involvement in the team efforts.

 

Iteration 5: ERP Team (Bi-word)

The third team of interviewees were doing the ERP project. Like in the previous iterations, the transcribed texts, these interviewees of three team members had been subjected to the bi-word and tri-word versions of the R-programme.

 

 

 

 

Figure 13: Word Map - ERP Project (Bi-Word)

 

 

The most prominent phrase in the bi-word iteration is “kind things” coloured gray and has the biggest font size.  The next biggest font size words are yellow green in colour.  They consisted of the phrases, “don’t know,” and the word “like.”  While these do not seem to indicate much the first phrase “kind thing,” seems to reveal the prevalent trait of the team management.

 

The next batch of this bi-word version are coloured dark green and is still of a considerably large font size. It consists of the phrases, “even though,” “department,” “don’t go,” and “like said.” These phrases do not seem to mean much even from the interviewer’s viewpoint. “Gentle heart,” with the colour purple came out distinct and does not have any other words or phrases affiliated with it.

 

The numerous phrases that dominate this bi-word iteration, are coloured orange and are split into two font sizes.  The first group consisted of the phrases, “management leadership,” “management project,” “don’t worry,” “this don’t think will,” “say don’t,” “right like,” “culture like,” “years already,” “like say,” “Gantt chart,” “don’t want,” “client don’t,” “will come,” “want like,” “project managed,” “project will,” “last time,” “make sure,” “kind things,” “think people,” “like every,” “working operations,” “corporate culture,” “third party,” and “PEAK system.” This batch seems to indicate the prevalence of a project team culture characterized by operations-oriented, client-conscious, and recognized proper management and leadership.

 

Among the word-phrases in this batch and the second group coloured orange, this one has a bold font. They include “think,” “let’s say,” “PEAK project,” “like like,” “time management,” “every time,” “AIMS system,” and “project leader.” It is apparent that the respondents were conscious of their projects as serious business in the firm that required proper time management and leadership.

 

Iteration 6: ERP Team (Tri-word)

To explore a deeper understanding of the respondents’ texts derived from this team, a tri-word version was processed.  From this iteration, there are three colour differentiations that resulted from the iteration.  The first one with the largest gray font class produced the few phrases, “PEAK project will,” “kind thing,” and  “client don’t know.”  The interviewees were clear about the project, that the CEO instructed one of the team members to inform the clients more of the positive outcomes of the project rather than highlight the mistakes that could anyway the CEO advised him that could be anyway resolved. 

 

Figure 14: Word Map - ERP Project (Tri-Word)

 

 

The next group was orange coloured and also consisted of a few phrases, namely: “thing like,” “working operations department,” “don’t even start,” and “kind thing don’t.”   These phrases do not figure clearly with the interviewer besides that the team considered their role in the company to be focused on operations.  This affirms what had been deduced from the previous team interviews that were translated into word maps as well using the programme.

 

The final group of phrases is uniformly coloured red and this has the most number of phrases presumed to associate themselves with each other.  They include “project PEAK,” “say don’t worry,” “system kind thing,” “get event carry,” “don’t come back,” “project will succeed,” “small little things,” “give name list,” “challenges encounter project,” “event start use,” “time management project,” “’m years old,” “give inputs deal,” “kind thing kind,” “kind thing think,” “I’ll come back,” “gentle heart integrity,” “now I’m working,” “don’t want like,” “project managed superior,” “values mission,” “deal clients like,” “haven’t gone live,” “like say like,” “ERP system background,” “system background don’t,” “thing like,” “don’t worry proceed,” “lot things,” “working CNC department,” “management leadership project,” “doesn’t influence doesn’t,” “project leader,” “feedback kind thing,” “describe way project,” and “thing don’t know.”

 

The prevalence of negatives to the interviewees does not imply a clear observation.  They could mean emphasis on the more positive references on the concepts of management, leadership style, operations, project leadership, work environment, goal orientation, and success.

 

Iteration 7: Combined Interview Texts (Bi-word)

The combined iterations resulted in a bi-word version and a tri-word version just like the other previous ones.  In the first bi-word map, Figure 15 below, besides the “channel partner” phrase which indicates the project where the interviewees worked under, the word batch, “gentle heart, “kind thing,” and “don’t know” have the same font size and the same light brown colour. This could indicate association of notions regarding these phrases’ meanings.  This could also indicate that the terms, “gentle heart” and “kind thing” somehow describe the culture that the project or the whole organisation altogether observed at the time of the interviews. The phrase, “don’t know” has no significance or could indicate some non-knowledge of certain question items asked by the interviewer.

 

Figure 15: Word Map - Combined Interview Text (Bi-Word)

 

 

The last bi-word group is composed of the same font size and colour pink.  It consists of the words and phrases, “corporate culture,” “like,” “know,” “think,” “project leader,” “will tell,” “come back,” and “don’t want.”  Among these words and phrases, “corporate culture” apparently stood out to mean closest to the theme of this whole dissertation. It seems to link to “project leader.” Besides “don’t want,” the words, “think,” “like,” “know,” “come back,” and “will tell,” there are no other negative notions that seem to emanate from this batch.  The researcher interprets this as signs that favoured the project leader having been able to create a team culture the team members do not complain about.

 

Iteration 8: Combined Interview Texts (Tri-word)

The last iteration is a tri-word version of the combined interviews.  See Figure 16 that follows. It distinguishes “style,” “leadership,” and “management” to be of the same font, grey colour, and row. This indicates the impact of what these words connote in the organisation’s project team structure.  The next batch of words and phrases that indicate the influence of the firm’s top management (Palani’s) appeared with the same font features as the words and phrases in this bunch. “Channel partner” and “PEAK project” came out to belong to this word-phrase group. Along with these, “client don’t know,” “kind thing,” “Palani say don’t,” “pertaining management style,” and “leadership management style.” This seems to confirm how the CEO impacted the team members despite the presence of a team leader in these projects.  While there are somehow neutral, or negative, feelings about the firm’s management’s style, these word-phrase batch is dominated by positive traits that favour the CEO-leader.  

 

The last batch consisted of words and phrases that mixed references to the “project director,” “management role,” “management style leadership,” and similar other words and phrases that tend to indicate projects that are managed. 

 

 

Figure 16: Word Map - Combined Interview Text (Tri-Word)

 

 

 

 

The words, “superior,” “role,” “working,” “better ways,” “managed,” “suggestions,” and “corporate culture” in this batch is perceived to point to a project team culture that is well controlled and getting the good results done.

 

 

Implications of the Findings

At the onset, it is necessary to justify the implications through citing the evidences that stemmed from this study’s statement of objectives, the process of achieving them, the discourse from analysing what resulted from the investigation, and the ensuing consultancy model explained earlier. Limitations to the study, however, provides the boundaries to prevent generalizations that might disqualify the valuable outcomes of this research from being considered as objective and scholarly contributions to the community of practice and body of knowledge.

 

The theme analysis from the 100 leadership-related literature chosen to explore the foundation for this study as extensively presented earlier, resulted in the word, “transformation” along with its stemmed words, “transformational” and “transform” prevailing in the word map. This indicates that, for almost two decades as covered by the publication years of the literature systematically reviewed, the body of knowledge recognizes that transformational leadership over-rules empirical practice of leadership and management in many part of the world.  It is further defined with the associated terms relating transformational leadership to prevail over transactional leadership (Drayton, 2017) and observed among many others, to be enforced in organisations developing group cultures where entrepreneurship, knowledge, studying, learning, researching, participation, sharing, and relationships are valued. See Figure 17 below, Sequence of Data Gathered and Analysed.

 

 I can associate with this result of the systematic literature review in that in my consulting practice more than 20 years ago when I first started using a leadership and management style that was defined by transactions that I assumed to have helped my clients more through factual business and operational angles. It was characterized typically by lack of deeper personal engagements and/or of more profound understanding of the human psyche, emotions, and more profound social connection. I discussed this in the earlier section of this dissertation (Introduction, Pages 20-21).

 

Historically, as my management style evolved, I could clearly understand the relevance and timeliness of the positive change. I could not ignore the  culture both externally influenced greatly by the society I was thriving in, one where cultural harmony has been consistently and effectively the emphasis (Shanmugam, 2019), and internally as well, as deduced by the sentiment analysis of the past interviews conducted in 2015, four to five years prior to the most recent interviews conducted for the purpose of exploring the evolutionary changes in my leadership approach.

 

The sentiment analysis of that previous data gathering exercise revealed that my colleagues perceived my style to recognise diversity, team spirit, acknowledgement of opinions and ideas, a thinking practice, sense of respect, people-orientation, acceptance of minority groups in the workplace (women) who incidentally became the majority due to the nature of business at that time, and the open acceptance of valuing time in regard to goal achievement.  Shafique and See (2018), Saeed (2014), and Guay (2013) argued that productivity, team cohesion, competitive edge, integration and obliging leading style, and effectiveness, among many others, are hallmarks of transformational leadership.  As such, it is clear to me that my approach to team leadership and management adapted to that which was called for in that phase in my consulting career, hence, it was not much of a surprise that my consulting practice has remained resilient all these years.  Thanks to the continuous learning and education that I pursued along the way (Introduction section of this study, Page 21), amongst other things.

 

The recent set of interviews proved that the evolutionary changes in my leadership style continued.  The sentiment analysis showed evidence that the transformational style of leadership and management I employed in my organisation, combined with my consulting practice, has even grown stronger and profound.

 

A valued corporate culture was confirmed to be a necessary concept playing an especially important part in my management and leadership approach. This was evident in the previous inquiry as well as in the recent one. I have to note that I had worked with a totally different batch of colleagues in these two eras. Yet the level of expectation to be an effective leader in both experiences remained unchanged.