Transformational Leadership Competences in an Outdoor Leadership Programme

Sammanfattning: Based on the interest in the fields of leadership and outdoor education, this paper aims tovinvestigate how leadership is trained in an outdoor leadership programme in Sweden and to what extent the observed competences are consistent with the concept of transformational leadership. The transformational leadership style is considered to be the most popular leadership style and is therefore of particular interest for this study. The research is motivated by the belief that outdoors is a highly suitable place for the acquisition of (transformational) leadership skills, which has already been proven by several authors before. After a detailed literature review on transformational leadership as well as on outdoor leadership, a participant observation was conducted over the period of four days at Sjövik’s folkhögskola in the course ‘Friluftsliv-Hantverk-Ledarskap’, which can be translated as outdoor activities, crafts and leadership. The observation protocols were analysed using deductive thematic analysis, applying the transformational leadership competences ‘idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation and individualized consideration’ developed by Bass & Avolio as clusters for the analysis. In specific terms, the transcripts were searched for situations that could be assigned to these competences. The results reveal that leadership is particularly trained on the basis of a good relationship between leader and participants as well as the space for development for the participants and can thus be classified in previous research results regarding transformational and outdoor leadership. It was shown that the observed competences can be assigned to the transformational leadership style, but at the same time there is still a need for further research.