Abstract
The purpose of the research was to formulate a leadership praxis framework that could be used for enhancing productivity in the forestry sector in Zimbabwe. The study was motivated by my desire as a practicing forester for improvement, and my conviction that it could be done amid the country’s economic crisis for the past two decades. In the myriad of problems besieging the industry and the country at large, I have questioned the dominant, yet unchanging leadership approaches and objected to their origins. I have queried the sustainability of the prevailing management stance if the sector was to succeed in reframing business in line with the demands of the changing world. It is important that insight into the reframing of leadership praxis in the forestry sector illuminate leader relations with their subordinates at the workplace, and provide some solutions to the perceptions, theoretical and practical gaps. The study intended to qualitatively, reframe an integrate leadership praxis framework in this somewhat ignored area of research and more so, in a matchless business operating context of Zimbabwe. In this thesis, I adopted a constructivist perspective. Constructionism is an ontological position that states that societal phenomena and their meaning are constantly being consummated by social players, and they are under continuous construction and adjustment. Through the epistemological notion of interpretivism, it was apparent to me as a practising forester there was a thin line between the researcher and what was being researched; hence a participative inquiry determined what counted as facts. I examined a sample consisting of a least 18 key informants and used a union of methods to obtain different perceptions of leadership phenomena. The research methods included interviews of a phenomenological nature, auto-ethnography, and casing to buttress grounded theory methodology and analysis. ..
Ph.D. (Personal and Professional Leadership)