MPH 508 Week 3 Leadership Theory Analysis Example

Leadership Theory Analysis: Transformational Leadership and Cross-Sector Collaboration Tested Against a School District That Declined to Become a Closed Dispensing Site

Student Name

Chamberlain University

MPH 508: Leadership and Administration in Public Health Systems

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Leadership Theory Analysis: Transformational Leadership and Cross-Sector Collaboration Tested Against a School District That Declined to Become a Closed Dispensing Site

The Situation

In 2025, working as the department's preparedness coordinator, I tried to recruit the county's largest school district as a closed point of dispensing. The district employs about 3,100 staff and could, in an emergency, give preventive medication to staff and their households at its buildings. Four meetings over six months ended with the superintendent declining in a short letter citing "liability, staffing and mission." The situation is useful for testing theory because the details are known, the outcome was clear and I made several choices that a theory would have predicted differently.

Transformational Leadership: What It Predicts

Transformational leadership describes leaders who articulate a compelling vision, model the behavior they ask for, stimulate others to think in new ways and attend to individual needs. A meta-analysis across many studies found that transformational leadership was strongly associated with followers' satisfaction with the leader, their motivation and leader effectiveness, though transactional contingent reward also predicted many of the same outcomes (Judge & Piccolo, 2004). Applied here, the theory predicts that a coordinator who presents a strong vision of a protected community, shows commitment and engages district leaders' values about protecting children and staff should move the district toward agreement.

The prediction is stated in advance so it can be tested: if transformational behavior was present and the district still declined, the theory explains less than it claims in this setting.

Testing Transformational Leadership Against the Situation

I did most of what the theory recommends. At the first meeting I described the 48-hour dispensing goal in terms of children: staff who could protect their own families would stay at work to care for students. I brought the health officer, who spoke about her own experience in a 2001 response. I offered to adapt the plan to the district's calendar and to train its nurses myself. District leaders were warm. The assistant superintendent said it was "exactly what schools should be doing."

The prediction failed on the outcome. The vision was received; it did not produce an agreement. The theory has no clear account of why, because its mechanism runs through followers, and district leaders were not my followers. They had their own board, their own lawyers and their own priorities, and admiration for a vision did not change any of those. Judge and Piccolo's (2004) evidence comes overwhelmingly from settings where the leader holds a formal role over the people being influenced, which my situation lacked.

A Second Theory on the Same Material

Crosby and Bryson's (2005) framework for cross-sector collaboration predicts something different. It holds that when no organization can solve a problem alone, leadership consists of building a shared understanding of the problem, creating forums where stakeholders can deliberate, sponsoring and championing the work, and using the formal arenas where decisions are actually made, such as boards and legislatures. It predicts that a single organization's vision will not move a partner unless the partner's own decision-making body takes the problem as its own.

Applied to the district, the framework fits closely. I never put the question to the school board, which held the authority to accept liability and assign staff. I met only executives who could admire the idea but not commit. I treated the district's lawyer as an obstacle to be answered with documents rather than as a stakeholder to be brought into a forum. Rebmann et al. (2021) found that fear of legal repercussions was one of the main barriers planners faced in recruiting closed sites; the framework would have told me to address that fear where the district decides, not in my slides.

Table 1

Two Theories Applied to the School District Decision

Note. Note. Situation from the writer's composite program records, 2025.

What Public Health Does to Both Theories

Public health settings strain both theories in particular ways. Preparedness is about rare events, so partners are asked to commit resources to something that may never happen, which weakens the appeal of any vision. Public health agencies often depend on partners they cannot direct, which removes the formal authority that transformational leadership assumes. And public health decisions are public: a school board's decision is made in an open meeting under political scrutiny, which raises the importance of formal arenas that the cross-sector framework emphasizes.

Which Theory Is More Usable

For leading without authority in preparedness, the cross-sector framework is more usable because it tells the leader where to act, not only how to behave. Transformational leadership is not wrong; it describes how I want to work with my own staff and with partners once they have joined. But it would not have told me to take the dispensing question to the school board with the district's lawyer at the table, and that is the step that might have changed the outcome. In 2026 I plan to ask the health officer to request a place on a school board agenda, with the county attorney present, so that the board can weigh the liability question in its own forum.

Limits of This Test

One situation cannot settle which theory is better, and this test has three limits. I am both the leader and the analyst, so my account of what I did may be kinder than an observer's. The district may have declined for reasons I never heard, such as a budget fight with the county that had nothing to do with dispensing, in which case neither theory's prediction was really tested. And the cross-sector framework fits partly because I read it after the outcome; a theory chosen after the fact will always seem to fit. A fairer test will come in 2026, when I take the question to the school board as the framework recommends and the outcome can be compared with its prediction made in advance.

References

Crosby, B. C., & Bryson, J. M. (2005). A leadership framework for cross-sector collaboration. Public Management Review, 7(2), 177-201. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719030500090519

Judge, T. A., & Piccolo, R. F. (2004). Transformational and transactional leadership: A meta-analytic test of their relative validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(5), 755-768. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.5.755

Rebmann, T., Foerst, K., Charney, R. L., Sandcork, J., & Mazzara, R. L. (2021). Approaches, successes, and challenges in recruiting closed points of dispensing sites: A qualitative study. Health Security, 19(3), 327-337. https://doi.org/10.1089/hs.2020.0219