Abstract/Summary

The thesis is in contextual leadership theory which underpinned the examination of leadership influence and the consequence of contextual performance. The contribution to knowledge is that botho leadership style imparts considerable spontaneity in active interdependent interactions of leadership and followership behaviours in a hybrid context. Leadership has been extensively defined but contextual performance definition has been extended to illustrate ‘going far and beyond job tasks’ in emphasis of context. Firstly, the aim was to investigate how a leader influenced the contextual performance of a follower who was a high-performer and of one who was average. Thereafter, I identified the relevant leadership behaviours in the process of influencing follower behaviours to higher performance. Secondly, the thesis discovered that leadership was constituted in followership and hybrid contexts with the benefit of related performance domains. Overall, the study filled the gap in leadership theory confirming that context matter and identified the relevant contextual behaviours arising from different contexts, which either enhanced or hindered contextual performance. This cross-sectional study used the social constructions approach, interpretive paradigm and qualitative methods to illuminate leadership influence. The 48 people from 16 triads answered open-ended questions, in face-to-face in-depth interviews. The textual data from the 16 triads, made up of 16 leaders and two of their direct reports, created multiple cases which enabled me to subject the data to hierarchical coding in NVivo. Coding was followed by both within- and cross-case analysis, which unearthed hidden contextual leadership-followership behaviours. A major theoretical contribution is botho leadership style embedded in a hybrid context to account for contextual performance. Horizontal influence and task interdependence in botho contextual behaviours prompted differential leadership influence. The contribution to practice informs African leaders to optimise performance by correctly characterising relevant contextual leadership and followership behaviours in leading interdependent teams. In practice, embedding followership behaviours clarified the proximity that work engagement, adaptive and team performance were additional outcomes of leadership. Finally, the triad as a small group closed the hole between co-workers and networks as conceptualised by embedding task interdependence. Key words:botho, hybrid contexts, contextual leadership theory, followership, contextual performance, proactive and adaptive behaviours,triads,network influence, interpretive paradigm,qualitative methods.