Understanding Dance Leadership Through Organizational Framing Analysis: A Mixed-Methods Approach

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify the management and leadership practices needed in university dance programs, identify the artistic attributes that are transferable to administration, and determine administrator's leadership orientation.

Methods: A mixed method approach was used to collect, analyze and interpret the data. The qualitative methodology used interviews, focus groups, and open-ended survey questions to understand, describe and discover the perspectives, philosophies, and skills that dance administrators draw on in their leadership and management practice. The quantitative methodology used a survey instrument to measure dance administrators' leadership orientation, perceived management and leadership effectiveness, and the skills/tasks deem important in managing and leading a dance program.

Analysis/Results: Forty-four university dance administrators participated in this study. They indicated that their professional experience prepared them more (75%) than their educational experience (25%) for an administrative position. The top 10 administrative skills rated as “very important” included interpersonal skills, listening skills, expertise in arts discipline, enthusiasm, communication, creative thinking, living by example, developing trust, self confidence, and public/press relations. From the 28 skills rated “very important,” the symbolic frame skills had more representation, followed by the human resource frame, political frame skills, and structural frame. The transferable artistic skills for administration included creative process, people skills, organizational skills, perseverance, vision, survival, and humor. The human resources frame was significantly the dominant leadership behavior and leadership style. The symbolic frame was the second most dominant frame and was significantly used more than the structural and political frames. However, the symbolic frame was the dominant frame followed by the human resource, political, and structural frames as expressed by the focus group members and those interviewed. In addition, 58% of the participants were multi-frame leaders, 33% were dual-frame leaders, and 9% were single-frame leaders.

Conclusions: These findings suggest that dance administrators are multi-frame leaders and bring a wealth of human resource and symbolic perspective experience to administrative practice. Bolman and Deal (2003) suggested that administrators who work from an artistic approach are more holistic using a multi-frame perspective. These results indicated that artists do view their administrative abilities from multiple perspectives. In addition, every participant in this study indicated that she or he continued to participate in teaching and creative activities, allowing her or him to still be engaged as an artist while being an administrator. This may contribute to the high degree of artistic skill crossover for administrative practice.