Applying the Leadership Traits Approach to Volunteer-based Community Media

The role that leadership plays in the success or failure of community media organizations is an under-researched area. The concept of leadership in this paper refers to positive influence that moves a group towards its goals and is different from management because it relies on social influence rather than legitimate power to influence people. Focusing on the case studies of two community media organizations in rural Kansas, USA, the paper uses the Kirkpatrick and Locke model of leadership traits to examine the leadership qualities exemplified in these two organizations. The paper found evidence of all the six traits described in the model (drive, leadership motivation, honesty and integrity, self-confidence, cognitive ability and knowledge of business) present in both case studies. The paper also contributes to the further refinement of the model by identifying two other extra traits that ought to be considered in future community media studies.


Introduction
Maintaining a demanding production schedule with a mostly volunteer staff is a challenging proposition. Neuhold's personal contacts in Greensburg and Kiowa County, along with an outreach to local high school journalism classes and other community service programs, has so far netted a good base of volunteers to maintain KCMC operations. And Neuhold has been successful in leading the organization. A study conducted in 2014 found that Neuhold's leadership in first recruiting and then teaching video production principles to the volunteers was essential in making the project work (Bressers, Smethers & Mwangi, 2014).
Understanding the leadership qualities to motivate people to volunteer and perform challenging video production tasks would certainly be prescriptive for similar community based media firms.

Literature Review
The role that leadership plays in the success or failure of community media organizations is an under-researched field (Kung, 2006). Indeed leadership has been described as one of the most neglected areas of research in the field of media management (Mierzjewski & Holifield, 2006). The few studies on leadership issues in media industries have focused on topics such as relationship between leadership and change (Gade, 2004;Killebrew, 2003;Perez-Latre & Sanchez-Tabernero, 2003), organizational problems (Sylvie, 2003, and organizational values and priorities (Demers, 1993(Demers, , 1994(Demers, , 1996Edge, 2003); however, little research has focused systematically on media leaders in particular. The concept of leadership in this paper refers to positive influence that moves a group towards its goals (Catt & Miller, 1985). Leadership is different from management because it relies on social influence rather than legitimate power to influence people (Powers, 2006).
A long-standing debate on what constitutes leadership includes individual traits, behaviors and styles, interaction patterns, organizational culture and environmental contexts as important contributors to effective leadership (Burns, 1978). Another contested area of inquiry is the very definition of leadership with the most common definition focusing on the extent to which a leader's organizational unit performs its task successfully where such success might be measured in terms of sales increase, profit margin, productivity, or market Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies Volume: 8 -Issue: 1 January -2018 share. Much of the research on leadership has focused on company or government level leadership and dwells on human resource and management issues (Walton, 1999). Politis (2006) found that there had been very few studies that had focused on the issue of leadership at the sectoral level such as the media industry. A rare sectoral study focusing on the media industry found that the leadership characteristics profile for those in the media industry must mirror the transformational changes shaping the industry which is undergoing massive structural changes caused by technological developments affecting production processes, organizational structure, the products and market positions (EU, 2002). The changes in the media industry are also dependent on parallel developments in other fields such as information technologies and new structures for production workflows (Comprint, 1998).
Given these transformational changes, some of the ideal leadership characteristics valuable for those in the media industry would include the ability to create a vision and provide strategic thinking, motivation of stakeholders, teamwork, decision-making capability, ability to communicate with other people, and ability to create and maintain effective relations with key players relevant to the media sector. Ferrucci (2015) argues that as technology continues to enable various models of journalism to emerge, it is important to understand how leadership impacts the culture of a media organization. Newsroom leaders have great impact on the organization culture and work processes that emerge under their leadership as they provide the vision, resource allocation, power, and organizational structures and processes (Tuchman, 1978;Paterson & Domingo, 2008Schein, 2006. Gans (1979) found that in media organizations owned by large corporations, newsroom leaders usually executed the vision of the corporate office. Schultz (2007)