Leadership maintenance: Filling the gap for leadership competences

In this study, leadership maintenance employs psychological, sociological and physiological paradigms in creating a conducive environment for both leaders’ and followers’ well-being in educational settings. Leadership maintenance is an ongoing process, which entails the understanding of leader’s cognitive complexity, relational approaches towards motivating their followership for generating leadership competences. This is maintained by understanding leaders’ and their followers’ psychological, sociological, and physiological state of mind. Open ended interviews were conducted to collect data from 30 participants during a training session organise by the Educational Leadership Institute at the University of Johannesburg. The participants were educationalists comprising principals, teachers, and students representatives from different educational sectors in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. Understanding the psychological, sociological and physiological paradigm for the wellness of leaders will inform leadership competences. This is achieved through understanding followership and the situational variables associated with it. Thus, wellness of followership is intimately related to the wellness of leadership and contributes to creating a harmonious organisational climate. The reciprocity of leadership actions towards followership leads to the reflectivity mirror effect. The actions of both leaders and followers that incorporate psychological, sociological and physiological state parameters results in reciprocity, which in turn determines leadership competences.