Methodological Challenges and Solutions for Leadership Researchers**

Zusammenfassung

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Leadership scholars are faced with pressing methodological issues that challenge our current scholarship. In this paper, methodological concerns such as multi-level hypothesis testing, construct validity of group-level scales, sampling countries in cross-cultural research, self-report measurement are discussed - issues that are endemic to organisational leadership research. This paper points out the methodological challenges facing modern leadership researchers, and points to possible solutions that can provide opportunities for future progress in our field.

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Methodological Challenges and Solutions for Leadership Researchers**

The quest for explanation and prediction of effective organizational leadership has occupied social science researchers for the better part of the 20lh century (Bass 1990; DeMeuse 1986; Mitchell 1979). Now at the dawn of 21st century, the growing sophistication of leadership theories has presented organizational researchers with important methodological questions in need of urgent answers. In this paper, we address several methodological issues which, in our estimation, cannot be ignored. In particular, we discuss several issues surrounding level of analysis as well as cross-cultural research. We will also discuss issues surrounding alternatives to self-report measures. It is our hope that this discussion will prove useful to researchers by identifying solutions to these methodological issues.

Levels of analysis issues

There is growing awareness of the importance of level of analysis issues in the broader organizational literature (Klein/Kozlowski 2000; Hoffman 2002). Levels of analysis issues become a concern when empirical data has a nested or multilevel structure. Even though simple random sampling is taught in the typical graduate level statistics course, researchers clo not frequently employ this sampling strategy in field research. Rather, researchers often obtain their data by gaining access to one or more organizations and then gathering information from multiple individuals within each organization. In all likelihood, several individuals probably come from the same work team in each organizat...

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