Navigating Leadership Flexibility: How do technical Leaders pick the right approach?

Original Project

I completed my final year undergraduate research project at the University of Sussex in 2024, investigating how leaders working in or with technology choose the right leadership style. Academic literature uses a Person-Situation distinction as an orienting assumption. While my project didn’t address this inadequate Person-Situation dichotomy directly, I tried to investigate how my participants engage with changing their leading and managing approach.

I identified five interesting challenges in my lit review which leaders must face:

1. Increasing Change and Complexity in the external environment.
2. Decision-making with ambiguity and uncertainty.
3. The Person-Situation separation in existing leadership theory.
4. Aligning Org Culture with Leadership Activities.
5. Managing authenticity and style change in response to sitatuational factors

And I identified four main emergent themes:

1. Use of Data
2. Social Perception and Cognition
3. Declared Values
4. Differences of Authenticity

See the Executive Summary and Full Dissertation below for more information on the findings and study methodology. I’ve also included the Interview Schedule which I used as the basis for the semi-structured interviews.

Secondary Analysis

I also performed secondaray analysis of my original research using Natural Language Processing methods in Python while studying at The London Interdisciplinay School as a postgraduate student in 2025. Using KMeans Topic Modelling clustering and improvement ratio analysis I successfully verified the number of themes I identified during primary analysis.