Management Opinionnaire

Abstract

The Management Opinionnaire is a specialized psychometric assessment instrument developed in educational administration to evaluate the leadership philosophies, behavioral orientations, and managerial styles of school executives, particularly local school district superintendents. Originally formulated and validated by David M. Webb (1975) at Duke University and subsequently investigated by W. E. Sistrunk and E. R. Jenkins (1980), the instrument operationalizes core tenets of mid-twentieth-century organizational psychology. Specifically, the tool synthesizes Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y with Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton’s Managerial Grid (spanning styles 1,1; 1,9; 9,1; 5,5; and 9,9). Structured as a 27-item self-report survey, the opinionnaire assesses administrative orientation across three fundamental operational domains: (a) forces within the executive educational manager (12 items), (b) forces within subordinate workers (6 items), and (c) forces within the organization (9 items). Items are scored along an inverted five-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Strongly Agree) to 5 (Strongly Disagree). Psychometric investigations demonstrate robust internal consistency, yielding a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .80 in pilot samples. The Management Opinionnaire provides researchers and educational leadership practitioners with a methodologically grounded diagnostic framework for assessing how administrative self-concept, beliefs regarding employee agency, and structural organizational paradigms interact to shape executive decision-making within public school systems.

Keywords

Management Opinionnaire, Educational Leadership, School Superintendents, Theory X and Theory Y, Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid, Organizational Climate, Leadership Style, Educational Administration, Administrative Behavior, Psychometrics

Authors

The Management Opinionnaire emerged through sequential academic investigations in educational leadership and organizational administration:

• David M. Webb, Ed.D.: Primary instrument developer; developed and initially validated the opinionnaire in his doctoral dissertation at Duke University (Department of Education, Durham, North Carolina, 1975), investigating modern management concepts and administrative practices among North Carolina school district leaders.
• Walter E. Sistrunk, Ed.D.: Professor of Educational Leadership, Mississippi State University; advanced the cross-validation and empirical deployment of the instrument across broader regional cohorts of educational executives.
• E. Ray Jenkins, Ed.D.: Researcher in educational administration; co-investigator with Sistrunk in the 1980 regional validation study presented at the Mid-South Educational Research Association (MSERA), examining superintendent leadership orientations across public school jurisdictions.

Purpose

The overarching purpose of the Management Opinionnaire is to quantify, categorize, and diagnostically interpret the managerial philosophies and behavioral preferences that guide executive educational managers—specifically district superintendents, assistant superintendents, and central office instructional leaders. Educational institutions represent complex bureaucratic and socio-technical systems where leadership orientations directly govern institutional climate, teacher retention, curricular innovation, and community relations. Despite the critical nature of executive leadership, the subjective values and cognitive models held by school superintendents historically lacked standardized, theoretically unified psychometric measurement.

From a theoretical perspective, the instrument addresses the need to bridge conceptual leadership typologies—such as Douglas McGregor’s human relations assumptions and Blake and Mouton’s task-versus-relationship behavioral grid—with the situational realities of educational organizations. The scale establishes an empirical bridge between an administrator’s internal beliefs and their overt administrative behaviors. In both research and clinical/diagnostic settings, the tool enables:

• Empirical Profiling of District Executives: Delineating whether an administrator operates predominantly from an authoritarian, task-driven paradigm (analogous to Theory X or 9,1 management) versus a participatory, human-growth orientation (Theory Y or 9,9 team management).
• Alignment Diagnostics: Measuring congruence among an administrator’s self-concept, their trust in subordinate personnel (such as principals and instructional staff), and their perceptions of formal organizational hierarchy.
• Leadership Training and Executive Coaching: Serving as a reflective inventory in university-level educational administration preparation programs and superintendent professional development institutes, helping leaders evaluate their assumptions regarding power, delegation, and organizational structure.

Psychological Construct

The Management Opinionnaire assesses educational leadership orientation conceptualized through a tripartite structural model. Rather than viewing leadership as a static personality trait, the construct is framed as a dynamic interaction among three distinct systemic forces:

1. Forces Within the Executive Educational Manager

Comprising 12 items (1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 16, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, and 27), this subscale operationalizes the administrator’s internal value system, professional self-image, locus of control, and interpersonal expectations. It measures the extent to which the manager believes in collaborative decision-making, personal creativity, the pursuit of professional responsibility, individualized consideration of staff, and leadership execution devoid of authoritarian coercion. Administrators scoring high on collaborative items within this dimension view their primary role as catalysts of performance, deriving intrinsic satisfaction from the achievement of organizational goals rather than external displays of institutional power.

2. Forces Within the Subordinate Workers

Comprising 6 items (8, 9, 14, 15, 19, and 24), this dimension measures the executive’s cognitive appraisals and psychological assumptions regarding the nature, motivation, and capabilities of their staff (e.g., building principals, supervisors, and classroom teachers). Grounded explicitly in the humanistic assumptions of McGregor’s Theory Y, this subscale gauges whether the executive perceives subordinates as inherently self-directed, intrinsically motivated, capable of rigorous self-control, and eager to participate in organizational life because they find their work fulfilling, as opposed to requiring close surveillance, external sanctions, or bureaucratic policing.

3. Forces Within the Organization

Comprising 9 items (3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 17, 18, and 22), this subscale evaluates the administrator’s conceptualization of organizational architecture, systemic alignment, and institutional governance. It focuses on the degree to which the leader values systematic, step-by-step procedures, objective-based accountability, clearly defined job descriptions, organizational adaptability, and the reciprocal alignment of institutional objectives with individual employee aspirations. This dimension assesses whether the leader conceptualizes the school district as a rigid, top-down hierarchy or as an adaptable, communicative, goal-oriented open system.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual architecture of the Management Opinionnaire integrates two seminal twentieth-century organizational management paradigms, supplemented by situational contingency theory:

McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y

In The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor (1960, 1969) posited that managerial actions are governed by implicit assumptions regarding human nature and motivation:

• Theory X assumes that human beings possess an inherent dislike of work, will avoid it if possible, lack ambition, prefer close direction, and must be coerced, controlled, and threatened with punishment to achieve organizational goals.
• Theory Y posits that physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest. Under proper organizational conditions, individuals exercise self-direction, self-control, seek responsibility, and possess widespread capacities for ingenuity and creative problem-solving.

The Management Opinionnaire directly operationalizes Theory Y principles across its subordinate-forces and manager-forces scales, evaluating the degree to which educational leaders hold enlightened human-growth assumptions versus control-centric orientations.

Blake and Mouton’s Managerial Grid

Complementing McGregor’s motivational dualism, the instrument incorporates Robert R. Blake and Jane S. Mouton’s (1964) Managerial Grid, which maps leadership styles along two independent behavioral axes: Concern for Production (task accomplishment) and Concern for People (interpersonal relationships). The grid identifies five primary behavioral archetypes:

• Theory 1,1 (Impoverished Management): Low concern for both production and people; exertion of minimum effort required to sustain organizational membership.
• Theory 1,9 (Country Club Management): High concern for people, low concern for production; thoughtful attention to employee needs leads to a comfortable, friendly organization atmosphere at the expense of output.
• Theory 9,1 (Authority-Compliance / Produce or Perish): High concern for production, low concern for people; operational efficiency results from arranging work conditions such that human elements interfere to a minimal degree.
• Theory 5,5 (Middle-of-the-Road Management): Moderate concern for both production and people; adequate performance is achieved by balancing the necessity to get out work with maintaining employee morale at a satisfactory level.
• Theory 9,9 (Team Management): High concern for both production and people; work accomplishment is achieved through committed people, with interdependence through a common stake in organizational purpose creating relationships of trust and respect.

The items of the opinionnaire reflect these styles by capturing preferences for collaborative goal-setting (9,9), reliance on structured job descriptions and procedural clarity (9,1 / 5,5), or prioritization of employee well-being and autonomy (1,9 / Theory Y).

Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s Contingency Continuity

The structural partitioning into “forces in the manager,” “forces in the subordinate,” and “forces in the organization” directly mirrors Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s (1958, 1973) classic continuum of leadership behavior. According to this model, effective administrative decision patterns are contingent upon the executive’s accurate diagnosis of these three intersecting spheres of organizational reality.

Validity

Empirical validation of the Management Opinionnaire has been documented across multiple stages of instrument deployment:

Content and Construct Validity

During the initial development of the instrument by Webb (1975), content validity was established through extensive theoretical mapping against McGregor’s constructs and Blake and Mouton’s operational definitions. A panel of experts in educational administration, curriculum theory, and organizational behavior evaluated the item pool to ensure that the 27 items accurately reflected the behavioral manifestations of the five managerial grid styles and the three environmental forces within public school systems. Items with ambiguous wording or overlapping theoretical targets were iteratively refined or deleted.

Criterion and Comparative Research Findings

In their regional validation study, Sistrunk and Jenkins (1980) administered the instrument to a sample of 125 practicing school district superintendents across Mississippi. To examine the construct validity of the three forces and their influence on self-reported leadership styles, non-parametric Chi-square (χ²) analyses of independence were conducted across categorical response distributions. The analyses demonstrated statistically significant differentiations:

• Superintendents overwhelmingly endorsed items reflecting Theory Y assumptions and Blake and Mouton’s 9,9 (Team Management) style, particularly regarding the value of collaborative decision-making (Item 2) and shared goal formulation (Item 6).
• Chi-square tests confirmed significant associations between an executive’s valuation of organizational structure (Forces within the Organization) and their operational reliance on formal job descriptions and measurable competency metrics (p < .05).
• The distribution of responses across the three forces categories demonstrated distinct structural variance, confirming that administrators differentiate between internal self-perceptions, beliefs about staff competencies, and institutional structural mandates.

Reliability

The reliability of the Management Opinionnaire has been established via internal consistency analysis:

• Internal Consistency: In pilot psychometric testing conducted with a sample of N = 30 advanced graduate students in educational administration and practicing central office administrators, the instrument yielded an overall Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of .80. This level of internal consistency exceeds standard psychometric thresholds (.70 to .80) for exploratory and descriptive attitudinal instruments in organizational research.
• Item Homogeneity: Subscale inter-item consistency was reinforced by the theoretical coherence of the clusters: the 12-item manager subscale, the 6-item subordinate subscale, and the 9-item organizational subscale exhibited strong internal cohesion, reflecting coherent underlying attitudes toward institutional power, human agency, and structural formalization.
• Standard Error of Measurement: In sample distributions of superintendents (N = 125), response distributions clustered systematically in the “Strongly Agree” (1) and “Agree” (2) categories on collaborative dimensions, demonstrating consistent response stability across educational leadership cohorts.

Factor Analysis

The original psychometric architecture of the Management Opinionnaire was derived through deductive rational-theoretical grouping aligned with Tannenbaum and Schmidt’s three-force taxonomy and Blake and Mouton’s matrix. Subsequent examinations of the underlying item structure have confirmed the operational independence of its three subscales:

• Factor 1: Managerial Self-Efficacy and Autonomy (Forces within the Executive Manager): Items 1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 16, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, and 27 cluster heavily around executive agency, non-coercive authority, individualization of leadership, and openness to upward organizational communication. This factor accounts for the largest proportion of common variance.
• Factor 2: Organizational Formalization and Goal Alignment (Forces within the Organization): Items 3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 17, 18, and 22 load strongly on systematic procedures, measurable competencies, formal organizational charts, and mutual goal alignment. This factor reflects structural administrative stability.
• Factor 3: Subordinate Autonomy and Human Agency (Forces within Subordinate Workers): Items 8, 9, 14, 15, 19, and 24 define a distinct factor characterized by beliefs in staff self-motivation, self-direction, self-control, and intrinsic alignment with district educational missions.

Modern psychometric re-analyses of educational leadership inventories derived from this tradition suggest that while the tri-partite division demonstrates strong conceptual fit, exploratory factor analyses (EFA) frequently reveal moderate latent cross-loadings between individualization of leadership methods (Item 26) and subordinate self-direction (Item 19), reflecting the theoretical interdependence between Theory Y beliefs and supportive managerial behavior.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The formal technical parameters and operational characteristics of the Management Opinionnaire are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Management Opinionnaire
• Alternative Title: Preferred Leadership Style of School Superintendents Survey
• Authors / Developers: David M. Webb (1975); validated and adapted by W. E. Sistrunk and E. R. Jenkins (1980)
• Year of Development: 1975 (Duke University); 1980 (Mid-South Educational Research Association)
• Constructs Assessed: Educational leadership style; Theory X vs. Theory Y management assumptions; Managerial Grid orientations (1,1; 1,9; 9,1; 5,5; 9,9); tri-force administrative framework.
• Target Population: Executive educational managers, local school district superintendents, assistant superintendents, central office administrators, and aspiring educational leaders.
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire; paper-and-pencil or electronic administration; individual or group format.
• Total Number of Items: 27 items
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Forces within the Executive Educational Manager: 12 items (1, 2, 7, 10, 11, 16, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27)
  • Forces within the Subordinate Workers: 6 items (8, 9, 14, 15, 19, 24)
  • Forces within the Organization: 9 items (3, 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 17, 18, 22)
• Response Format: Inverted 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly Agree
  • 2 = Agree
  • 3 = No Opinion
  • 4 = Disagree
  • 5 = Strongly Disagree
• Scoring and Interpretation Procedures: Item scores are summed or averaged within subscales. Note that because 1 represents Strongly Agree and 5 represents Strongly Disagree, lower numerical values represent higher endorsement of the stated managerial, subordinate, or organizational practice. In modern psychometric applications, researchers frequently reverse-score items (5 = Strongly Agree, 1 = Strongly Disagree) to facilitate direct correlation with positive organizational outcomes. Subscale mean scores can be plotted against normative profiles to categorize administrative styles along the Managerial Grid.
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Management Opinionnaire was originally created by David M. Webb in 1975 as part of doctoral research at Duke University and subsequently published in the public educational research literature by Walter E. Sistrunk and E. Ray Jenkins in 1980 through the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC document ED 197 430).

As an academic instrument disseminated via government-supported educational databases (ERIC / Mid-South Educational Research Association) without proprietary commercial copyright encumbrances, the Management Opinionnaire is accessible for non-commercial academic, research, and institutional assessment purposes. Researchers and educational practitioners may utilize, administer, and adapt the scale provided appropriate scholarly attribution and standard academic citation are granted to Webb (1975) and Sistrunk and Jenkins (1980). No user fee, licensing royalty, or specialized publisher certification is required for academic usage.

References

• Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1964). The managerial grid: Key orientations for achieving production through people. Gulf Publishing Company.
• McGregor, D. (1960). The human side of enterprise. McGraw-Hill.
• McGregor, D. (1969). The professional manager (W. G. Bennis & C. McGregor, Eds.). McGraw-Hill.
• Sistrunk, W. E., & Jenkins, E. R. (1980). The preferred leadership style of school superintendents. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Mid-South Educational Research Association (New Orleans, LA, November 12-14, 1980). ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED 197 430. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED197430
• Tannenbaum, R., & Schmidt, W. H. (1958). How to choose a leadership pattern. Harvard Business Review, 36(2), 95–101.
• Tannenbaum, R., & Schmidt, W. H. (1973). How to choose a leadership pattern: Retrospective commentary. Harvard Business Review, 51(3), 162–180.
• Webb, D. M. (1975). Modern management concepts and practices in North Carolina local school systems (Doctoral dissertation, Duke University). Dissertation Abstracts International, 36(07A), 4185.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)