Developing a Leadership Model for Iranian Government Organizations

Leadership is one of the most vital roles and duties of a manager. The inadequacies caused by the increase in the size of the government and the expenses of the government sector, more than ever, reveal the importance of changing government management and paying attention to the role of leaders. In this article, the authors have concluded that according to the multiple characteristics of government organizations in the present era, among the theories, models, and new concepts of leadership, attention to characteristics of the leader, follower, and context can be an efficient approach for leadership in government organizations. On this basis, considering human knowledge management with an Islamic and Quranic perspective, a new model has been designed to fill the gap in the literature.

Avolio (2012) believes that leadership comes to the fore when a leader interacts with followers in a specific context, and all work together to achieve a common goal or a set vision. Many researchers have emphasized the need to pay attention to the mutual interactions of the three dimensions of leader, follower, and context. Leadership research has gone through different paths. Leadership in Islamic culture is a blessing given by God to humanity. Talib Hasham (1991) considers leadership in the organization to be aligned with Sharia. The life-giving school of Islam is a comprehensive and perfect religion with rules and regulations for all aspects of human individual and social life. Leadership in Islamic culture is a blessing that God has made available to humanity; for that, He puts a blessing on man's neck. Therefore, in Islamic culture, man is a creature created by God and covers all his needs and shortcomings in his life. The most critical need is how to use facilities and tools i.e. leadership and management. In terms of management, it is logical and necessary for societies to have a forward-looking view of their growth and survival and plan accordingly. Leadership can pave the way for motivating everyone's determination toward the realization of the desired future, decision-making, and capacity-building for the continued life of the organization. Therefore, the present research has designed a new image of leadership by referring to Islamic texts and considering the aspects of the leader, follower, and context to provide a practical solution for the leaders and managers of the organization.

This research was done in a mixed method. For extracting the dimensions and designing the model, the meta-synthesis method and interview with thematic experts have been used, and the structural equation modeling method has been used to test the model. In the qualitative part, the concepts related to leadership in the three areas of leader, follower, and context from theoretical literature, previous research, and native and Islamic studies were summarized and categorized in three stages and led to the identification of 320 basic themes and 20 secondary themes. These 20 themes were finally classified into three main categories: leader, follower, and context. Before meta-synthesis, the advantage of the qualitative method of content analysis was used to extract themes from native and Islamic studies. Based on a sample of 300 experts from defense, cultural, social, and distribution organizations, the quantitative part examined the research hypotheses. The findings of the quantitative section showed that the leader dimension and the follower dimension have a beta coefficient of 0.096 and 0.094, respectively, and the background dimension has a beta coefficient of 0.082.

Leadership is one of the topics that can create the power of clear foresight to achieve goals in both leaders and followers. The findings of the present research show the dimensions of leadership in the three dimensions of the leader with the components of projection and foresight, encouraging and empowering, cleaning and organizing, competence, servanthood and good deeds, the dimension of the follower with the components of self-leadership and multi-dimensionality, empowerment and development, responsibility and resilience, moderation and moderation, jihadi activity and moral virtues and the context dimension with the components of social, political, cultural, economic, legal and legal contexts, security, national and international and technology have been identified and explained. The results of the quantitative section indicate that the combined attention to all three dimensions of leader, follower, and context has been able to explain 82% of the significant impact of leadership. Also, the influence of the leader dimension is stronger than the other two dimensions. The leader dimension alone can predict 93% of the meaningful impact of leadership. At the same time, the correlation of the leadership dimension with the dimensions of leader and followers is stronger than the correlation of the leader and context.

The results of the present study based on the significant impact of all three dimensions of leader, follower, and context in the leadership of Iranian government organizations were consistent with several other studies that emphasized the identified dimensions in different areas of leadership. Also, by simultaneously considering all three structures of leader, follower, and context, it is possible to solve the complexities and dynamics of the environment. In future research, researchers can investigate the mediation role in the relationship between leader, follower, and context and the mutual correlation between these dimensions and its impact on the leadership of Iran's government organizations.