Follower voluntariness in secondary school subject departments: the interplay of influence and motivation

ABSTRACT

Follower voluntariness is central to the operation of any work group and arises from the interplay of leadership influence and follower motivation. By following a qualitative methodology embodied in semi-structured interviews, this research considered how voluntariness operates. It focused on secondary school subject departments – these being chosen because they are the sites for direct and unmediated interactions between leaders and followers. Thus a purposive sampling strategy was adopted. The research took place in the UK and Malaysia. The data were analyzed thematically, codes generated by the interviews being used to identify emergent trends and ideas. It was found that teachers’ intrinsic motivation is a complex field consisting of ideology, professionalism and personal narratives. This was most obviously stimulated by autonomy, thus supporting the view that distributed leadership is motivational. Where leaders were found to have a major influence, it was in the accessing of followers’ personal motivational fields through the use of external reinforcers. The implications are that leadership has a marginal effect on follower motivation and, by extension, follower voluntariness, although leaders who are sensitive to the full scope of their followers’ motivational fields will be more successful than those who are not.

Introduction

That leadership is central to the educational mission has now become so widely accepted as to be regarded as axiomatic (Leithwood et al., 2019). Yet, while it is usually defined as relational (Luedi, 2022), it is all too often approached from the sole perspective of the leader. The other side of the equation, the people who – from convention rather than preference – tend to be called ‘followers’ (Matshoba-Ramuedzisi et al., 2022), are often not referenced at all. If they are, it is as the object of leadership, making of them a passive demos upon whom leadership is bestowed, not as co-creators of the leadership relationship (Bader et al., 2023; Collinson, 2006). Insofar as leadership’s effect on educational outcomes is indirect (Dutta & Sahney, 2022), followers are its medium: the extent to which they are prepared to contribute their voluntariness will do much to ensure leadership’s success or otherwise.

Follower voluntariness (Blom & Lundgren, 2020) does not, as a concept, enjoy much prominence in the literature, a gap that this article aims, in part, to fill. Questions have been raised about it on the grounds that followers may not enjoy the genuine freedom of choice essential to true volition (Almeida et al., 2021). What is undeniable is that a person leading and a person being led do not necessarily feel the same way about the relationship (Walk, 2023). The upshot is that voluntariness must be considered not as resting purely with followers but as inherent to how leaders and followers deal with each other.

From the leader’s side comes influence. The essential relationship between a leader and a follower is that of one person somehow causing a change in the behavior or outlook of another (Zulkifly et al., 2020). How this is done can be explained by Yukl and Falbe’s (1990) list of social influence tactics. These range from pressure – the forcing of someone to do something against their will through the use of threat or implied threat (Alvesson et al., 2023) – to more collegial approaches (Jarvis, 2021) in which influence comes from equal treatment and shared meanings. In between these extremes are numerous others, including exchange tactics and rational persuasion (Yukl & Falbe, 1990).

It should be obvious that some of these operate in the external world and others are more intellectual and emotional; which are used by leaders depends on a number of factors, not least, the other element in voluntariness, follower motivation. If a leader wishes to change the behavior of another person, they must take them through a process involving intention, action and maintenance (Tambling, 2019). At each stage, a variety of factors will affect the motivation to change: mood, ambitions and more. Hallinger (2018, p. 7) describes such elements as ‘person specific contexts’.

Motivation can be briefly defined as a person’s inclination to take part in action (Pincus, 2023). Generally, it is theorized as being extrinsic or intrinsic in form (Morris et al., 2022). In other words, it may, in one guise, be external to an agent (Driver, 2017) and expressed in a desire to obtain rewards but experience is not its sole foundation (Delton & Sell, 2014): the intrinsic variety is internal, and so self-initiated (Barbuto & Moss, 2006). Motivation can, moreover, alter in intensity according to all manner of variables, from culture to gender – even to whether an actor is working independently or as part of a team (Hamedani et al., 2013). This is all, of course, a simplification. That the picture is far more complicated is an uncontroversial statement, but in what ways is open to debate. Be that as it may, it can be posited that voluntariness will originate in follower motivation but will either be constrained or enabled by leader influence, making of it a product of the interaction between the two variables (Almeida et al., 2021).

Since this area can best be investigated by looking at the closest and most direct leader/follower interactions, the research presented here took place within secondary school subject departments, the participants being department members – followers in the leadership relationship. Focus was brought to the research by the absence of the intermediary influences that may have added uncertainties to an exploration of, for example, the leadership relationship between principals and classroom teachers. A single research question was addressed: in what ways does follower voluntariness operate within secondary school subject departments? Answering it meant carrying out semi-structured interviews in the UK and Malaysia. A generic qualitative approach (Kahlke, 2014) was taken, which meant allowing the data to speak for themselves in an inductive way: no pre-ordained theoretical lens was applied.

As an output, this article’s objective is to push followers to the forefront of the leadership debate. Leadership cannot exist in the absence of follower voluntariness; other authority relationships and practices are possible, but they are not leadership. In that the field around these ideas is relatively small, this also speaks to the article’s significance. It begins with a review of the literature on motivation and the role in it of leadership, as well as extant work on followership in secondary schools. A justification of the research methodology follows, before the findings are presented and analyzed. The conclusion attempts to provide a definitive answer to the research question, along with some recommendations for leaders in secondary school subject departments.

Literature review

Motivation and influence

As an aspect of voluntariness, motivation should be appreciated as a complex psychological state that is constantly in flux (Duncan et al., 2022). Certainly, a caution needs to be sounded around accepting too simplistic a dichotomy between its two main categories. Current psychological thought places extrinsic and intrinsic motivation not as distinct from each other, but as inter-related facets of a single phenomenon (Kotera et al., 2023). Intrinsic motivation might usually be defined as a desire to be involved in an activity because it is inherently rewarding, but some authors position it as being about wanting to achieve an activity’s goals (Fishbach & Woolley, 2022). A third way, that of means-end fusion (Fishbach & Woolley, 2022) rests on the proposition that some activities are enjoyable in their own right but also have a desired end in sight, intrinsic motivation being present in both aspects: the coach of a school’s first XV might love their job but will still want their team to win.

Similar ‘expectancy’ theories (Hattie et al., 2020) site motivation in the anticipation of a positive outcome from an activity. Expectancy becomes especially crucial when considering extrinsic motivation, which may be proportional to the expected level of reward (Urhahne & Wijnia, 2023). There has been some debate around whether such feelings are proactive – self-initiated – or reactive – learned from experience (Morris et al., 2022). It has been found, in any case, that extrinsic and intrinsic motivation can be felt simultaneously (Djunaid, 2023), without there necessarily being a causal connection between the two.

The point, of course, is that there is no definitive explanation for how motivation works. That said, research generally supports the view that extrinsic reinforcers can increase intrinsic motivation (Suarez-Fernandez & Boto-Garcia, 2022) – although an emphasis on the goals of an externally-motivated activity can have the opposite effect if actors feel that it leads to a loss of self-control (Venketsamy & Lew, 2022). It follows that the members of a group influenced by a person or persons will vary from one to another in the degree of influence that they accept and the degree will fluctuate over time (Bari et al., 2019; Kim et al., 2023). Every member of a group – every follower – will therefore potentially respond to leadership influence in an individual way (Adair, 2006). Shorthand for this might be to suggest that each individual possesses a ‘motivational field’ of the factors that add up to their reasons for engaging in action. Some of these are intrinsic, some are extrinsic, some are short term and some long term. For the purposes of this article, this is the key underpinning of follower voluntariness.

However, in leadership studies the group angle is usually stressed. A leader is frequently imaged as the embodiment and epitome of an extra-individual group identity (Tee et al., 2013). Variations among followers are recognized, but the grouping of people by type is still a common feature. In work by Leithwood et al. (2010), influence is seen as being transmittable along different ‘paths’, including the rational, emotional and organizational, rather than being bespoke to relationships between individuals.

Writing on how followers can be influenced, not surprisingly, stresses extrinsic motivation, since that is the variety most under the control of a leader. The means by which leaders can extrinsically motivate are said to include valuing followers’ contributions and modeling positive behaviors (Steinmann et al., 2018), although cronyism is not to be ruled out (Shaheen et al., 2023). From an expectancy theory perspective, it can be said that a leader needs to correctly judge the value that a follower will place on a potential outcome and what they are willing to do to achieve it (Schaffer, 2008).

None of this is to say that leadership influence is irrelevant to intrinsic motivation. Since external factors such as leadership can have an effect on internal states, those in authority have the power to be the agent for engendering a feeling of self-worth in followers. Bureau et al. (2022) suggest that this is achieved through the creation of environments that support self-determination. They identify three needs that, if met, maximize intrinsic motivation – autonomy, competence and relatedness (Bureau et al., 2022), that is, the follower having decision-making capability, the leader demonstrating a high capacity for their role and the leader and follower establishing a strong interpersonal relationship. The authors were, admittedly, dealing with teachers and students, not leaders and followers, but the point holds.

Leadership and followership in secondary school subject departments

That the literature on followership remains relatively limited in scale and scope is, to some extent, a function of the passivity at the core of the concept – followers may be seen, by definition, as not doing anything worth writing about. This is a serious mistake that underestimates the importance of voluntariness. As Hinic et al. (2017) argue, followership echoes leadership in having various styles. These are determined by the proportions of independent thinking and active engagement in followers’ practice (Kelley, 1992). In effect, these indicate how much leadership is needed by followers and will, in part, be dictated by where followers are in their own professional journeys: some will be en route to taking on leadership responsibilities of their own (Taylor, 2023). Those close to achieving this goal are likely to be highly independent in their thinking and so less open to leadership influence than those further away.

Francis (2014) research on secondary school teachers who were content to be followers provides some practical case studies. He found that his participants’ apparent lack of ambition was traceable back to their motivations for becoming teachers in the first place. These were mostly related to their coming from homes that were stable, where education was valued and where at least one parent had enjoyed the benefits of a higher level of education. Some looked to teaching for its promise of a steady, secure career. Despite this, self-determination, realized in enhanced levels of professional autonomy, was much prized. In Kelley’s (1992) terms, a majority of participants were high in independent thinking and low in engagement. They went further in claiming that they sometimes not only rated themselves as more competent than their leaders, but as the ones who did the ‘real work’. This chimes with the contention of Hinic et al. (2017) that 80% of the effort in any endeavor is provided by followers, leaving only a small space for leadership.

It also seems to confirm the conventional belief that the most effective form of leadership in schools is that which is distributed (Harris et al., 2022). The espoused benefits of distributed leadership have not always been evidenced in student outcomes, or, as it happens, greater inclusiveness and equality (Lumby, 2016) but even distributed leadership agnostics concur that it has a positive impact on educators’ states of mind (Corrigan, 2013). That this leads to enhanced teacher motivation has been proven (Bektas et al., 2022), but any conflation of distributed leadership and teacher autonomy is an error. Autonomy can be circumscribed by distributed leadership (Hangartner & Svaton, 2022) and the urge to work free of leadership is not the same as the wish to take it on.

Research methodology

Research design

Given that the research focused on the subjective motivations of followers in specific situations, a qualitative methodology – one based around the uncovering of meanings, rather than the analysis of numerical data – was the logical choice (Pratt et al., 2022). A generic qualitative stance was, therefore, adopted (Kahlke, 2014). This meant accepting the attendant risks (Caelli et al., 2003) to the trustworthiness of the data (Clarke, 2022). It is only natural that where participants may not themselves be aware of their motivations, or readily able to articulate them, challenges arise. They were met methodologically. Semi-structured interviews (Brown & Danaher, 2019) that used a common schedule provided a basis for comparison. Additional spontaneous, non-predetermined questions were a means by which wider issues could be explored (Ruslin et al., 2022). The in-the-moment nature of interviews can entail participants voicing what they happen to have just thought about, rather than long-held and fully developed positions (Opdenakker & Varas-Díaz, 2006). This danger was obviated as far as possible by ensuring that all interviews were an hour or more in length, providing opportunities for answers to be revisited and interrogated further: if participants were consistent, it was likely that they were expressing their genuine thoughts, feelings and experiences (Husband, 2020).

Sample and sampling strategy

The sample, was, of necessity, purposive (Wood & Smith, 2015) – all participants needed to be members of secondary school subject departments. They were assembled through a mix of contacts and cold-calling. Where it could be done, several were drawn from the same department, but this was not considered crucial and was not rigorously enforced. In the event, the mixing of subject areas platformed different perspectives. Sample size was not regarded as a central concern. Gathering a sufficient number of individual stories was a goal, but since each participant was important in their own right, a relatively small number was not seen as an impediment to the reaching of valid conclusions. In general, this is characteristic of qualitative research. Four schools provided participants, two in the UK and two in Malaysia. All schools were from the independent sector: this largely reflected the difficulties of access to public sector institutions in both countries. Again, the nature of the research question meant that sector did not affect the quality of the data; participants were asked about their motivation in ration to individual leaders, not institutional type, quality or culture. The schools were a combination of schools that took boarding and day pupils, although this had little bearing on the work of academic departments. Of the seventeen participants interviewed, six were based in the UK and eleven were from Malaysia. The characteristics of the participants are given in Tables 1 and 2:

Table 1. Characteristics of the UK participants.

Participant	Subject Taught	Type of School
UK1	Biology	Independent boarding
UK2	Physics	Independent boarding
UK3	Physics	Independent boarding
UK4	Physics	Independent day
UK5	Geography	Independent day
UK6	English	Independent day

Table 2. Characteristics of the Malaysian participants.

Participant	Subject Taught	Type of School
M1	Art	Independent day
M2	Science	Independent day
M3	Mathematics	Independent day
M4	Chinese	Independent day
M5	Student affairs	Independent day
M6	Sociology	Independent day
M7	Mathematics	Independent day
M8	English	Independent day
M9	General studies	Independent day
M10	General studies	Independent day
M11	General studies	Independent day

This implies a comparative study – and, indeed, one was carried out for which an output will be forthcoming in the future. The two countries were selected because they happen to be where the researchers are based and because there are similarities between their education systems (Rahman & Manaf, 2017). As a consequence, it is possible, for the present article, to treat the data as a single set in order to answer the project’s research question and establish a conceptual foundation for further research. From this perspective, the international provenance of the data added richness, without loss to the integrity of the findings.

Research method

That the researchers were based in the two countries dictated that the interviews be carried out online – Microsoft Teams being the platform of choice – a method that has been much derided (Gray et al., 2020). The main criticisms are that it makes non-verbal information difficult to gather and analyze. It could also be mentioned that recent publications argue that online meetings reduce spontaneity (Jarvis & Mishra, 2020), militating against personal revelations. Notwithstanding any of that, research in the modern age – especially in post-Covid times – has become more relaxed about technology-mediated data gathering methods. The dangers have been found to be less acute than was originally feared, as well as relatively easy to legislate for (Thunberg & Arnell, 2022).

Since intrinsic and extrinsic factors are difficult to untangle (Duncan et al., 2022), the research explored all aspects of follower motivation. Current motivations were focused upon, but, in line with the work of Francis (2014), it was considered crucial to investigate what personal issues underlay them: how had follower motivations been shaped and what did that mean for voluntariness? The interviews, therefore, were designed to uncover elements of the participants’ histories that might have been of relevance, as well as other more immediate matters. The structured questions were devised around the research question and key themes from the literature review. The schedule included ten questions. Among them were questions about why participants entered teaching, whether their reasons for continuing in the profession were different, how their motivation fluctuated during the course of a day and in what ways their subject leaders motivated them.

Research ethics

In that the interviews probed the feelings and mental states of the participants, the ethical dimension was particularly important (Husband, 2020). The participants were willing volunteers, recruited after gatekeeper permission had been obtained, but detailed information sheets were supplied to ensure that their consent was fully informed. The interviews were recorded on standalone devices, before being transferred to password-protected hard drives. The same level of security was applied to the full transcripts that were produced after the interviews were completed. The interviews took place between November 2022 and March 2023.

Data analysis

The data were analyzed thematically (Roulston, 2013). They were coded, the codes coming from the interview schedules (‘motivation for teaching’, ‘influence of leadership’, etc.) and subjected to a reading that sought to identify emergent ideas and commonalities. It was appreciated that the words of interview participants are not limpid, but in need of interpretation and cross-comparisons (Roulston, 2013). Generalisability (Noble & Smith, 2015) of the findings was not an aspiration. The participants only needed to give an account that was true to themselves – larger, more objective, standards of truth were not required.

Even so, the themes and patterns identified, while peculiar to the participants, suggested trends of broader significance, if not applicability.

Findings

Motivation as an aspect of follower voluntariness

Intrinsic motivation from the act of teaching

A good deal of motivation was said to be engendered by a sense of duty to pupils. A teacher from Malaysia (M3) summed this up:

My motivation is when I get into the class and then the students is giving me some positive sign like the feedbacks that I’m getting when I’m teaching.

Similarly, a participant from the UK (UK6) said,

I don’t want to make this political, but I think that’s one of the reasons, for instance, that I don’t go on strike … you’re a professional, teaching is your vocation: you put the kids first.

The placing of teaching into the larger context of society informed many answers, such as one from a Malaysian teacher (M5):

The first thing to start with is the education; if the education fails, the whole generation is going to fail, so it starts from the school before they go to college, before they go to university.

Even when teaching was described as hard work, it was usually said to be the main source of motivation:

It’s a challenge for me to [teach] because we have different students – we have different mindsets, right? So that challenge, that small, small, challenge to make them better, that one is that that keeps on growing. (M7)

Significantly, motivation of this type appeared to increase over time, as was articulated by a teacher from the UK (UK6):

I definitely felt much less like it’s me and the classroom with some kids and much more like I’m part of a community and we all work together to support the children.

Motivations for entering the teaching profession

Motivations for entering teaching were somewhat more complex than predicted. An enthusiasm for working with children was present, but many of the stated reasons were pragmatic and extrinsic in character. A few participants claimed that teaching offered paid work at a time when paid work was needed. A Malaysian participant (M8), for example, said:

I think I was just looking for a job at that point, or I think someone just recommended, like, okay, why don’t you? I heard you were good in school and we need someone to teach.

A participant from the UK (UK2) echoed this:

Not long after the last recession, there were no job offerings, it was slightly thinner on the ground, but they were offering bursaries for teaching.

In much the same vein, the most frequently stated reason for becoming a teacher was a desire for social mobility. A number of moving tales were told of participants being born into poor families, or broken homes. Typical was:

I am from a humble beginning, very, very humble beginning – people call it the school of hard knocks, or something like that. (M1)

Similarly, one now very successful teacher (UK6) said:

My mum was a hairdresser, you know, like I didn’t have [high achievement] as an aspiration; so, in a way, for me, I guess [being a teacher] … was like the highest aspiration that I could see in terms of, you know, kind of clever women doing great stuff.

Teaching was often seen as a way out, offering professional and social status (UK4: ‘My mum’s a functioning alcoholic basically and always has been. I always wanted better for myself’).

For many, love of academic subject was a strong motivator, sometimes after a different career option had failed to satisfy. This was usually given the gloss of participants being true to themselves, one (UK3) saying that:

I quite liked the idea when I graduated of going into a job that would let me use the degree that I’d spent time studying, rather than it just being a gateway into some job that had no connection to it.

In moving on from these very similar starting points, Malaysian and UK participants largely agreed as far as sources of intrinsic motivation were concerned but, as has been shown, the former were in general more inclined to see the broader social value in their work, whereas the latter stressed the benefits to their pupils as individuals. This had its corollary in Malaysian participants expressing a professional identity based on service to larger entities such as the nation or their religion, in contrast to the UK participants for whom teaching was a career informed by personal vocation.

Day-to-day motivation

On the level of daily activity, most participants conceded that motivation is an inconsistent and fluctuating phenomenon. A participant from Malaysia (M2) observed that,

Teaching is not a very easy job; you have your ups, you have your downs. Some days are really very good. Some days you are feeling like you are rethinking that.

The interviews were peppered with mentions of ‘off days’, or ‘afternoon lulls’, as with one (M10) who said:

See, level of motivation is what, like, either you can be motivated or you can be demotivated. It is not that okay. Like today, I am a little more motivated, today I am a little less motivated.

Discussing the shifts of motivation within a single day, a teacher from the UK (UK5) claimed:

You kind of need constant self-affirmation and, you know, every teacher makes a thousand decisions in one lesson.

A participant from Malaysia (M10) made the same point but underlined the dangers inherent to it, starkly evincing the connection between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation:

You are playing with someone’s life, someone’s career. So that is how it is. Sometimes you feel low, but you can’t show it in your job or in your work.

Others spoke of having to perform tasks that they found unsatisfying – or, conversely, of experiencing moments of great joy:

The fact that [a parent] said to me, thank you, like, I’m like, that just made my career. (UK5)

Influence as an aspect of follower voluntariness

Subject leader influence

Several participants denied that their leaders had much impact on their motivation at all, one from the UK (UK3) claiming that:

[My head of department] doesn’t motivate me anymore to – to – work harder or any – yeah, any harder and not any less hard obviously.

A participant from Malaysia (M8) was in agreement, stressing that external reinforcers for intrinsic motivation often came from other sources:

For motivation, so it – it would be hard for me to pinpoint like a, you know, a person that I would get it from; it’s more of like instances and circumstances and a feeling that I get after I’ve interacted.

Such sentiments sprang from a much vocalized advocacy of teacher autonomy: ‘I still think that you need to give people freedom, even if they mess it up’. (UK6)

A central influence tactic for subject leaders was said to be praise. Those who were prepared to give due recognition to the contribution of followers were described as particularly successful. A participant from the UK (UK1) said:

In the background, [my subject leader] was complimentary about me, supportive with the head.

A participant from Malaysia (M6) gave a more detailed answer:

So, so, [the subject leader] is like, you know, whenever I feel very kind of, you know, lazy, or I feel like a little bit down or those kind of things, [it helps] to chat with her: she’ll give you a lot of good stuff, basically. She’s like, you know, she’s like encouraging you a lot.

Subject leaders were often – but not always – granted a role in helping teachers to maintain their effectiveness throughout a day, even as motivations fluctuated. A participant from Malaysia (M8) spoke of this:

To deal with a department with a lot of teachers where they all have, like, different mindsets and principles – I think when you are able to kind of navigate that - all of that - and still come to a conclusion at the end of the day, I think that is quite inspiring.

Subject leader influence and follower demotivation

Where subject leaders were said to be demotivating, or where they failed to build motivation, it was often through perceived failures in broadly technical and managerial areas. Poor management of staff time came in for criticism (M4: ‘Sometimes you get overloaded, okay, due to some work’). A deficit of leadership vision was criticized, especially when it was encapsulated in an unwillingness to adopt novel and innovative working practices:

Sometimes you can have more of a fixed mindset for things like that. I find sometimes that demotivating because sometimes it might be good like, oh well, let’s just try something different, but then they’ll say no. (UK5)

While a failure by subject leaders to give praise was not particularly mentioned as a source of lower motivation, criticism, especially when it was apprehended as unfair, was. One participant (M2) gave an example of this: ‘[My subject leader] reprimanded me twice because I did not complete my work’. Another (M7) spoke in more abstract terms, making much the same point:

So maybe [a pupil] will get B or C and then that time like it is the management will tell you why your result is going down? Why this child is not getting A and you feel that, okay, I don’t want to stress that.

Malaysian subject leaders came across as quicker to criticize than their UK counterparts, but no evidence was found to suggest that subject area was a factor: relationships between leaders and followers were seen to hinge on the personalities and professional approaches of the individuals concerned.

Subject leader influence on followers’ long-term motivations

When it came to subject leaders having an understanding of participants’ longer term motivations, the picture was mixed. On the one hand, some participants valued their relationships with their subject leaders and felt motivated when interactions were personal and collegial in style. A participant from the UK (UK5) said: ‘I guess more the personal stuff probably goes a long way for me and is more memorable [than professional advice]’. An instance of this in action came from a UK participant (UK6) who described how being helped to overcome a paucity of cultural capital helped to increase her confidence:

At department meetings [colleagues] would all sit around talking about what they’d seen at the theatre and, oh, you remember darling, and so on … [The subject leader] took me to loads of performances, so I guess I eventually got my own anecdotes.

On the other hand, and more frequently, subject leader knowledge of, or interest in, teachers’ broader motivations was dismissed. A participant from the UK (UK4) alluded to this:

I haven’t explicitly said I want a better life for myself. [The subject leader] knows I’m intrinsically motivated, I hope. I have a lot of conversations with him.

A participant from Malaysia (M8) said:

I think that even though I know that I am very different and they know that I’m very different, I think that it doesn’t really come up in conversations.

Discussion

Participants usually gave responses that underlined the importance of intrinsic motivation (Morris et al., 2022), teaching being viewed as an activity that is enjoyable, or fulfilling, in its own right (Novitasari et al., 2021). As has been seen, external factors were in evidence: these were usually related to meeting pupils’ needs. Pecuniary motives were almost universally rejected, possibly because participants felt that not to do so risked their being accused of lacking moral purpose (Onyefulu et al., 2023). Whatever their basis, when external factors were perceived as positive, they reinforced commitment (Ryan & Decdi, 2020).

None of this indicates that teachers’ motivations were fixed and unwavering. Such claims as were made while contributing to the research should not be read back into past activities and feelings. Intrinsic motivation, even with external reinforcers, may have been privileged, but, when considering motivations at professional starting points, vocation came through weakly. A suggestion from the data was that an ever more finely-honed sense of vocation developed as the participants’ careers progressed – albeit that the nature of that vocation differed between the two constituencies investigated. Still, it was seen to build a foundation of autonomy and competence (Bureau et al., 2022) that lay behind a level of self-determination and concomitant intrinsic motivation (Ryan & Decdi, 2020).

In Fishbach and Woolley’s (2022) terms, motivation for taking up teaching was largely linked to a goal – that of some form of self-improvement, or of starting a career that promised predictability and stability. Francis’s (2014) findings were only partly confirmed. Some participants, certainly, described comfortable upbringings and located their professional commitment in a desire to ‘give back’ to an independent school system that had endowed them with acknowledged advantages. They were in the minority, although most participants did agree with Francis (2014) in their opinion that teaching as a career option lacks volatility.

If an inherently enjoyable activity convinced participants to join the profession, it was less the act of teaching and more the study of a subject. This was a position that, for most, altered over time. Some participants appreciated teaching as a way to learn new skills and acquire fresh knowledge, but, at the point of entry, could not clearly articulate what these might be. Again, motivation was intrinsic, but it conformed to the goal attainment paradigm (Urhahne & Wijnia, 2023).

On the whole, the data do not endorse the conclusion that subject leader influence accounted for long term career shifts in motivation: many participants sited subject leaders as external influencers, but as ones who largely operated in the capacity of organizers and administrators. Effective influence in action (Driver, 2017) was mostly said to consist of clear instructions, the provision of appropriate resources and the modeling of good practice. Relatedness (Bureau et al., 2022) was not always said to be a requirement; one participant (UK6) called her subject leader a ‘terrible’ person while extolling him as a role model for his formidable intellect and outstanding abilities in the classroom.

Participants agreed that crucial subject leader strategies for enhancing extrinsic motivation in followers were the giving of praise (Steinmann et al., 2018) and the offering of support. Empathy was granted some importance, even if it was not always identified within a subject leader’s practice (Gomez-Leal et al., 2022). Behaving in a way that – whether wittingly or not – resonated with the long-term underpinnings of a follower’s intrinsic motivation was occasionally seen to allow a subject leader to be successful in raising that individual’s commitment and performance. Otherwise, ‘life history’ elements were said to remain unspoken within departments, despite being potent drivers of follower motivation and, indeed, ways in which participants constructed their professional identities (Collinson, 2006). Nonetheless, intrinsic motivation was said to be built by subject leaders who were able to engender a sense of well-being in followers.

When subject leaders were described as being less adept at providing external reinforcers, the intrinsic motivation of department members was offered as an override: intrinsic motivation based around wanting to do the best for students was granted greater potency than any contribution that leaders might make. Conversely, drops in teacher intrinsic motivation were shown to be compensated for by extrinsically motivated duty, fueled by an awareness of what teaching and learning mean for the futures of students.

Only a handful of participants asserted that their motivation remained at a constant high throughout the day – and they generally had some form of extrinsic reinforcement (Driver, 2017) to keep them going (usually a moral conviction connected to religious faith); again, this brings different forms of motivation together. For most participants, the average day was portrayed as a tapestry of motivations, with different types happening simultaneously or consecutively, depending on circumstances (Djunaid, 2023). Sometimes, interventions by subject leaders were highlighted as useful in negotiating a path through, but, for the most part, this was not a salient feature of the data.

Conclusion

Limitations of the research and future directions

Delineating the edges of a qualitative study is always difficult – when does data-gathering reach ‘saturation’ point (Saunders et al., 2018)? As small scale as this project was, it garnered enough participant viewpoints for patterns to emerge. Some distinctions between the UK and Malaysian participants have been hinted at, but an analysis of the influence of culture on follower voluntariness is not the purpose of this article. Moving forward, such an analysis is being prepared. Moreover, the research could be extended in other ways. Quantitative, survey-based work would paint a larger, more three dimensional, picture, as well as create the conditions for generalization of the findings. There would also be some virtue to expanding the research beyond school subject departments, in order to explore other types of followership and leadership. A project looking at voluntariness from the perspective of leaders is among those currently under consideration.

Enhancing follower voluntariness

As it stands, this project’s main finding is that the intersection of leader influence and follower motivation is a fluid and dynamic place (Almeida et al., 2021). Since it has been posited as the location of follower voluntariness, the nature of leadership as a relationship or process (Collinson, 2006) is far from straightforward. It is fair to say that the findings could be critiqued as doing little more than demonstrate different cases of Kelley’s (1992) followership styles, but that would be to ignore what they indicate about the nature of follower intrinsic motivation. As the bedrock of the leader-follower relationship, it would be wrong to categorize it as a set of uncomplicated and easily satisfied desires. As has been shown, it is part of a complex field and consists of emotions, professionalism, ideology and personal narratives. The greatest driver of subject department member behavior has been seen to be a vocation based around commitment to student and pupil welfare and success. This is the area in which varieties of motivation become most inextricably intertwined.

What, then, is the subject leader’s role? That the participants uniformly claimed to feel ex nihilo intrinsic motivation (Fishbach & Woolley, 2022) suggests that leader influence is limited and marginal (Hangartner & Svaton, 2022). They cited themselves as the ones who modulated varieties of motivation to keep their effectiveness as high as possible throughout an evolving and challenging day. Self-determination (Bureau et al., 2022), it would seem, is the major underpinning of follower motivation, which supports the contention that distributed leadership is a positive, although, really, teacher autonomy is the true hero here. Whether the motivation in question is intrinsic or extrinsic will depend on the nature of the distributed leadership, or teacher autonomy, in any situation.

Insofar as they had a role, subject leaders were said to be at their most effective when influence overlapped to a significant degree with a follower’s motivational field. This was said to happen irrespective of the leader’s intentions. Extrinsic motivation in the form of praise was shown to be particularly efficacious, as was the providing of external reinforcers to followers’ intrinsic motivation. It should be reiterated that neither approach was insisted upon by all participants and both were outright denied by some. At the other end of the spectrum, participants, when asked to report occasions when they felt let down by their subject leaders, generally highlighted extrinsic factors (Hattie et al., 2020), such as a failure to provide a resource, poor organization or unfair distribution of work. Expectancy (Hattie et al., 2020) was less about the rewards that followers might receive than their expectations of what their leaders ought to be doing for them. Extrinsic factors were also given as powerful motivators, with modeling of good practice as primus inter pares.

If follower voluntariness is the product of a conjoining of leader influence and follower motivation, this research suggests that the balance is skewed very much toward the latter. That is not to write leaders out of their own story, but in looking for a takeaway for leaders and managers, the research’s recommendation might seem banal: give praise. This is to follow a superficial line. While the range of available influence tactics is relatively narrow, leaders need to utilize them in the knowledge that they are founded on multifarious factors internal to followers that must be understood and accounted for in action. Those leaders who aim for maximum effectiveness would be advised to take a sensitive and nuanced view of the individual motivational fields with which they interact in the day-to-day running of a work group, such as a secondary school subject department

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Professors Robin Simmons and Rob MacDonald for their comments on an earlier draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any funding.

Notes on contributors

Adrian Jarvis

Adrian Jarvis is a senior lecturer in the School of Business, Education and Law, University of Huddersfield, UK

Pradip Kumar Mishra

Pradip Kumar Mishra is an associate professor in the Centre for Academic Partnerships and Engagement, University of Nottingham Malaysia, Malaysia