1. Predicting Transformational Leadership through Leadership Efficacy and Motivation to Lead: Investigating the Differences between Leadership Studies Courses and Team-Based Project Courses
Dr. David Rosch, Ph.D. and Daniel Collier, MAHPI College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences; College of Education
Introduction
Contemporary leadership education should be structured as a cross-disciplinary effort designed to educate individuals and organizations in building inclusive, high performing, and ethically guided environments (Dugan & Komives, 2007; Heifetz, Grashow, & Linksy, 2009). There are ongoing higher education pedagogical debates between individual centered learning and team-based learning (Felder & Brent, 1996). This debate is influenced by growing interest in leadership studies (Middlehurst, 2009) and the desire of the current generation of college students to work and thrive in collaborative teams (Association of American College and Universities, 2012). As student leadership development research emerges as a field, contrasting and comparing environments and methods could assist with identifying best instructional practices (Posner, 2009).
Past research has shown that there are distinct differences between students who are interested in leadership and those that are not. Schertzer and Schuh (2004) found that students who occupy formal positions of influence within students groups possess higher self-esteem and consider themselves leaders among their peers to a greater extent than students without such formal positions. Others have shown that student positional leaders are more committed to tasks (Ricketts, Bruce, & Ewing, 2008) and the individualized responsibilities of the leader (Stedman, Rutherford, & Roberts, 2006). However, this line of research has not yet been extended to include students who elect to take academic courses in leadership education, nor has it been applied to examine differences between types of students interested in different levels of leadership practice.
Taking pre-instruction and post-instruction measurements of transformational leadership practices (Podsakoff, ManKenzie, Moorman, & Fetter, 1990), leadership efficacy (Dugan & Komives, 2007), and a student’s motivation to lead (Chan & Drasgow, 2003) will provide leadership educators data that may influence instructional pedagogy and encourage further research on how students learn and develop through various leadership educational methods.
Population and Sample
The study was conducted at a large, public, research-extensive university in the Midwestern United States. The researchers focused on two courses within the college of engineering. The first course, an Introduction to Leadership Studies class which we will call the ‘Leadership class,’ was designed to focus on the study of leadership and leadership capacity-building in an engineering context. The second course, a Teams-based Projects class which we will call the ‘Teams class,’ was designed with a practical focus to teach teamwork skills in project planning and management to students entering a four-year curriculum emphasizing such skills. Both courses were elective in nature and open only to first-year students matriculated in any major within the engineering college. These courses were part of a menu of courses designed to augment the traditional engineering curriculum with complementary skill-building courses.
Students who were enrolled in both courses were not included in the study. Of the 54 students in the Leadership Studies course, 50 (93%) participated, while 116 of 125 (93%) participated in the Team-based Projects course. Approximately 80% (n=133) identified as male, while 56 % (n=93) identified as Caucasian-American, 18% (n=30) as Asian-American, 15% (n=25) as an international student, and the remaining 11% as African-American, Latino/a, or other/unidentified.
Variables and Instrumentation
We utilized a 60-item survey that included scales of transformational and transactional leadership behaviors, leadership self-efficacy and motivation to lead.
To measure transformational and transactional leadership, we used these two scales from the Transformational Leader Index (TLI) (Podsakoff, MacKenzie, Moorman, & Fetter, 1990), a 28-item instrument designed to measure leader behaviors that generally align to transformational or transactional values. Item responses include a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree.”
The survey also included a 4-item scale of Leadership Self-Efficacy (LSE) that is utilized within the Multi-Institutional Study of Leadership (MSL) and has been used in studies of college student leadership in the past (J. P. Dugan & Komives, 2010). Item responses include a 4-point Likert-scale ranging from “Not at all confident” to “Very-confident.”
Student’s motivation to lead was measured using the Motivation To Lead (MTL) scale (Chan & Drasgow, 2001), which included 27 items divided equally across three subscales, Affective-Identity (AI) Motivation, Social-Normative (SN) Motivation, and Non-calculative (NC) Motivation.
Results
Score Differences Between Courses with Respect to IV and DV Scale
Significant differences were found in transformational leadership behaviors (t(164)=2.24; p=.03); transactional leadership behaviors (t(164)=2.31; p=.02); AI motivation to lead (t(164)=2.12; p=.03); and SN motivation to lead (t(164)=2.50; p=.01). No significant differences were found in LSE scores (t(164)=1.64; p=.10) or NC motivation to lead (t(164)=0.52; p=.60).
Females Display Higher Levels of Motivation
Significant differences emerged with respect to each motivation to lead scale: AI, t(158)=-2.54, p=.01; SN, t(158)=-2.04, p=.04; and NC, t(158)=-2.45, p=.02, meaning that females displayed higher motivation to lead within all three scales than males. No significant differences were found in either transformational or transactional leadership behaviors, or in LSE.
Conclusions
Our research results suggest that students interested in the explicit study and practice of leadership are motivated to lead and report practicing leadership behaviors to a greater extent than peers interested in studying and practicing teamwork. However, our findings imply that they may not possess a higher degree of leadership self-efficacy. Moreover, while leadership self-efficacy served as the only significant predictor of transformational leadership behaviors for students interested in leadership, both affective and social-normative motivation to lead, and leadership self-efficacy predicated these behaviors in students interested in teamwork. Female students, regardless of course, displayed higher levels of motivation to lead.
These findings suggest that a pathway to increase the number of students interested in the explicit study and practice of leadership is through more explicit attention to their inherent motivations to lead. While many leadership initiatives emphasize a behavioral-focused curriculum and market themselves based on their potential impact, leadership educators may be more effective in reaching out to new populations of students through a focus on helping students recognize their potential roles as leaders of their peers first.
Means and Standard Deviations for Overall Two-class Sample, Leadership course, and Teams course
Overall
Leadership Course
Teams course
Variable SD
LSE
3.17
0.64
3.30
0.65
3.11 AI
3.55
0.72
3.72
0.77
3.47
0.69 SN
3.63
0.49
3.77
0.45
3.57 NC
3.62
0.56
3.65
0.66
3.61
0.52
Transformational Leadership
3.84
0.42
3.96
0.39
3.80
Transactional Leadership
4.01
4.13
0.44
Predictors of Transformational
Leadership Behaviors within
Leadership Course Students
Predictors of Transactional Leadership Behaviors within Teams Course Students
Research Questions
Do significant first-order differences exist between students who choose to enroll in either a leadership theory course or a team-based project management course?
What factors significantly predict the practice of transformational leadership behaviors in students within the two courses, and do differences exist across the two? B
SE B Β P
Step 1
Race
.07
.06
.15
.29
Gender
.12
.08
.58
Step 2
.02
.05
.60
-.01
.09
.97
LSE
.26
.10
.43
.01 AI
.18
.28 SN
.11
.20 NC
.46 B
SE B Β P
Step 1
Race
.03
.04
.13
.50
Gender
-.03
.08
-.04
.67
Step 2
.05
.09
.06
-.05
.47
LSE
.20
.30
.001 AI
.17
.28
.004 SN
.25
.07 NC
.52
Acknowledgments
Dr. Raymond Price, Professor and Severns Chair for Human Behavior in Engineering – University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign
Dr. Bruce Litchfield, Professor and Assistant Dean – Undergraduate Programs, College of Engineering – University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign
Karen Hyman, MA – iFoundry Associate Director, University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign
Dr. Bryan Wilcox – Post-doctoral Researcher, College of Engineering – University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign