LEAD 6011 Module 3 Leadership Characteristics Assessment Example

Self-Ratings Against Six Raters: What an Authentic Leadership Assessment Showed a County Health Education Manager About Balanced Processing

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6011: Leadership as a Reflective Practice

Module 3 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 26, 2026

Introduction

Module 2 ended with an uncomfortable finding: under time pressure I discounted advice from a community health worker, and she had learned from earlier experience in our section that pressing a disagreement could cost her. This paper asks whether that incident was an exception or a pattern. I completed a structured assessment of authentic leadership characteristics and invited six coworkers to score me on identical items. I report the results by dimension, interpret the gaps between my view and theirs and connect them to the incident and to my working definition of leadership.

The Framework and the Instrument

Authentic leadership theory describes leaders whose behavior is guided by self-knowledge and consistent values. Gardner et al. (2005) proposed a self-based model in which leaders' self-awareness and self-regulation shape their behavior and, through modeling, the development of their followers. Walumbwa et al. (2008) built the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire and tried it on five samples drawn from China, Kenya and the United States. Their analyses held up a structure of four linked parts: knowing oneself, being open with others, acting from one's own moral standards and weighing evidence fairly, including evidence against one's preferred answer, before a decision is made. The last of these the authors called balanced processing. The questionnaire also explained differences in employees' attitudes and conduct that measures of ethical and transformational leadership did not.

I chose this framework because its fourth dimension speaks directly to what went wrong in June. The course provided licensed self and rater forms; the averages below use its five-point scale of how often a behavior occurs, where 0 means never and 4 means almost always.

Who Rated Me

Six colleagues completed the rater form anonymously through the course's survey link: four health educators who report to me, one community health worker and the deputy director I report to. I chose raters who see me in different settings, and I included two educators who have disagreed with me openly in the past year, on the reasoning that a sample of admirers would tell me little. The forms went out with a note explaining the purpose and promising that I would see only averages. I also completed my own form before inviting anyone else, so that my self-ratings could not drift toward what I expected others to say.

Results

On self-awareness I rated myself 3.0 and my raters averaged 2.9. Relational transparency was the exception that ran the other way, 2.8 from me and 3.1 from them. On internalized moral perspective the figures were 3.5 and 3.4. On balanced processing I rated myself 3.3, and my raters averaged 2.4. Three of the four dimensions show close agreement; the fourth shows a gap of almost a full point, and it runs in the direction I feared.

Item-level averages sharpen the picture. The items about soliciting views that challenge my position and listening carefully to different points of view before coming to conclusions drew the lowest rater scores, both near 2.0, while my self-ratings on the same items were 3.0 and above.

What the Raters Wrote

The rater form ended with an optional comment box, and four of the six colleagues used it. Two comments were warm and general, thanking me for clear expectations and for defending the section's budget. The other two were specific and harder to read. One said, "You ask what we think, but by then the plan is usually set." The other said, "Good at explaining decisions, less good at changing them." Neither comment mentions the June meeting, and I do not know who wrote them, but both describe the same habit from different angles.

The comments matter because numbers alone could be explained away as a bad week or one unhappy rater. Two people independently describing a manager who consults after deciding is harder to dismiss, and it gives the balanced processing score a concrete meaning: the problem is not that I refuse to listen, but that I listen at the wrong point in the process, when listening can no longer change anything.

Interpreting the Gaps

Self-ratings are not simply less accurate versions of others' ratings; the difference between them is information. Atwater and Yammarino (1992), studying military leaders in training, found that agreement between self-ratings and subordinates' ratings affected how well leadership ratings predicted performance, and that leaders who rated themselves considerably higher than others did tended to be judged less effective. A gap of nearly a point on balanced processing puts me, on that dimension, among the overestimators.

The gap fits the June incident too well to dismiss. I believe I weigh other views because I listen politely; my colleagues experience a manager who listens and then proceeds as planned. The higher rating on relational transparency is also telling. People see me as open about what I think, which may be part of the problem: a manager who states her view clearly and early makes it harder for others to offer a contrary one.

Limits of the Assessment

The results should be read with care. Six raters is a small group, and one strongly negative rater could move an average noticeably. Raters who report to me may have rated cautiously despite anonymity, which would make the high scores less certain than the low one. The instrument measures perceptions of behavior, not behavior itself, and a single administration cannot show change. Still, the pattern is consistent across raters, appears on the dimension I had reason to examine and matches a documented incident, which makes it more credible than any one of those pieces alone.

Connecting to My Definition of Leadership

My Module 1 definition put shared seeing and shared action at the center of leadership. Balanced processing is the part of that process that happens before action: taking in what others see. My results suggest that I do the seeing together less well than I believed. The definition still holds; my practice of it is weakest exactly where the definition asks me to share influence.

Next Steps

Two practices follow. In planning meetings I will state my own view last, after asking at least two people for theirs. For decisions affecting community work, I will ask one person who is likely to disagree, by name, for the strongest argument against my plan before deciding. I will repeat the rater survey with the same six colleagues in six months and treat a narrower gap on balanced processing, not a higher score, as the sign of progress. Module 4's review of my reflective journal will look for whether these practices actually appear in my week. I have told the six raters what I found and what I am trying, which also tests whether relational transparency extends to my own weaknesses.

Conclusion

The assessment confirmed most of what I believed about myself and contradicted the one thing I most needed to know. Seen alone, a 2.4 on balanced processing is a number. Seen beside my own 3.3, beside a community health worker's account of a hallway conversation and beside a definition of leadership that depends on sharing influence, it is a direction for growth.

References

Atwater, L. E., & Yammarino, F. J. (1992). Does self-other agreement on leadership perceptions moderate the validity of leadership and performance predictions? Personnel Psychology, 45(1), 141-164. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1744-6570.1992.tb00848.x

Gardner, W. L., Avolio, B. J., Luthans, F., May, D. R., & Walumbwa, F. (2005). "Can you see the real me?" A self-based model of authentic leader and follower development. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 343-372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.03.003

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89-126. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206307308913