Chapter 6: Building Theory in Leadership Through Electronic Networking

This chapter reports on a 3-year research project conducted in Australia, which investigated the challenges and ethical dilemmas faced by leaders in four frontline human service organizations. The study incorporated four complementary data collection stages, namely, questionnaire, interviews, critical leadership incident, and an interactive website, which is the main topic of this chapter. This customized, interactive website involved a number of leaders in a cutting-edge discussion and analysis on leadership issues and concepts emerging from preceding data. Specialist features of the website included: key discussion themes on leadership; hot topics emerging from these discussions; a voting facility to indicate opinion trends; and a series of daily satirical cartoons, specially designed from the emerging analysis of the data to attract participants to log on each day. A research moderator “managed” the website in order to maximize the engagement of participants and, in conjunction with the research team, helped “test” and validate emerging leadership concepts.