M.A. (Social Work) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

M.Ed. / South Africa, together with the rest of the world, has the need for leaders who are purposeful and have firm principles. Natural leaders among pupils must be identified and they must be assisted in accepting and fulfilling their call to leadership with skill and confidence. The object of this study is an investigation into the character and nature of the development of leadership in youth. Youth leaders must be trained to manage pupil activities effectively. It should never be a case of simply identifying the leaders and then leaving them to themselves in their newly acquired positions. The youth leaders remain dependent on support and therefore nave to be trained on a continuous basis. The youth finds himself in a unique situation which constitutes unique problems. Due to these problems, the content of a leader development program must be such that it creates an atmosphere in which the pupil leaders will have the desire to think about and to be knowledgable as to the problems of" their times. The content of a leadership development program focuses on two levels, namely the moral and practical or physical level. The youth has a specific need to be accepted and should be studied and considered in various educational relationships. Only when this has taken place, will the youth be open to the development of his leadership abilities. Every teacher acts according to his/her specific leadership style. The management style is actually part of the management leader and will materialize as such in the way in which leadership is given. The pupil leader will, therefore, also show a specific management style and this must be considered in the development program ...

M.A. (Counselling Psychology) / Management is an ancient art practiced in the past by among others fathers, kings and ministers. Today it is recognised that management pervades every aspect of society: the individual, family unit, the government and organisations. Virtually everyone is a manager in some phase of his daily life ...

M.Ed. (Educational Guidance) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

This study sought to understand what students learned about themselves as a leader as a result of taking a for-credit leadership seminar. The study used a qualitative case study methodology in order to interpret data collected through participant surveys and interviews. The participants were academically high-achieving college students who had won a prestigious combined academic and leadership scholarship. As a condition of accepting the scholarship, students participated in a one-unit leadership seminar. The study's findings included that after completing the leadership course, students had gained a more complex understanding of leadership concepts as well as a more complex understanding of themselves as leaders. After the course students could identify themselves as leaders in many different situations, including situations where they held no forma! leadership position. The findings indicate that as the students integrated the information on leadership theories and models into their personal understanding of leadership, their personal leadership identity became more complex. This finding adds to the literature on leadership identity development by indicating a possible mechanism for increasing the complexity of students' leadership identity.

The primary concerns of this study were to describe the most common practices of current college student leadership training programs in the United States and to compare the 1979 and 1997 findings by replicating the 1979 Simonds study. This study provides an overview of related literature on the history of leadership theory and the research on leadership training in higher education, a detailed description of the methodology, results of the survey, a comparative analysis of the 1979 and 1997 findings, and discussion of the current status of leadership training at institutions of higher education. Conclusions are drawn, and implications and recommendations for student affairs professionals are made that may improve the quality of student leadership in higher education.

This dissertation explored how eight artists who are also faculty in academic institutions and adult professional development programs teach leadership. As such, the purpose of this study was to understand to what extent and how these self-defined artists who also teach leadership in academic and professional development settings draw from and integrate their roles, skills, experiences, learning, and ways of making meaning as artists to facilitate leadership learning among adults. By doing so, this research sought to move beyond existing technical and conceptual knowledge of arts-based methods in leadership teaching to learning more about specific artists who have inspired or used such methods. Using the method of portraiture embedded in a qualitative exploratory interview study with narrative inquiry, this study reveals an aesthetic approach to research and presents narratives of eight artist-educators in the form of portraits. Portraits were analyzed thematically using a procedure of cross-portrait analysis. Four conclusions emerged from the analysis. These include evidence of participants’ greater integration or interdependence of artist-educator identities and roles in later stages of one’s teaching career, experience of some degree or form of transformation in personal learning journeys with art, emphasis on experiential learning as an essential aspect of teaching, and advice to emerging artist-educators to embrace their artistic ways of being and knowing and integrate art into their teaching. Several recommendations for future research and practice are offered along with concluding reflections.

Employability skill development is being increasingly investigated among higher education scholars, corporate hiring managers, and governments around the world. Understanding employability skill development is important because it has implications on educational policy, teaching techniques, curriculum designs, and recruitment practices. This study was conducted at a public research university in a southwestern state of the United States. It was designed to understand the difference in employability skill development among students who participated in a leadership development program compared to those who did not. Additionally, the study investigated what skills were seeing the most change among student participated in the leadership development program, and if a student's major of study played any role in their overall employability development over the course of a year. Eight employability skills were tested in a pre- and post-test model. Results indicated that students in leadership development programs are more likely to see an increase in employability skill development. From the skills tested among participates, those in the leadership program found the most change over time in the area of problem solving skills. Finally, the results also indicate that a student's major does have an impact on their overall employability skill development. Students who major in business had significantly higher employability scores than those in other majors at the university.

Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This work provides a comprehensive overview of the theories on adult learning. For each approach, the applicability for a leadership development programme is discussed. If available, examples for the use of a certain theory in a leadership course as part of a Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme are provided. An overview of the Personal Leadership Development Journey (PLDJ) of the University of Stellenbosch Business School (USB) is provided. The structure of the programme demonstrates the application of certain adult learning theories. Interviews with the alumni of the programme show how successfully the adult learning theories are practised and to what extent students have found them useful. Gaps in these interviews are pointed out with reference to the theories on adult learning. As an example, there is a certain body of literature on transformative learning as a subcategory of adult learning. In this case, two different theoretical approaches are explained, of which one is a more general discussion on adult learning and the other is focused on leadership development. Then an example of the application of this theory at the Institut Européen des d’Administration d’Affaires (INSEAD) shows how other business schools employ the theory in practice. In this case, the practical example is a leadership course as such, not a general MBA programme. The reason for this is that examples which match the situation at the USB exactly can not always be found. In the interviews, alumni of the USB were asked how the PLDJ impacted their professional and their private life. So indirectly, students were asked if a transformative learning process had taken place and how they would describe it. The analysis of the results is used to point out the strength of the programme as well as gaps, which could be addressed for future improvement.

The purpose of this study was to determine if leadership training, given to informal leaders, had a positive effect on manufacturing productivity. The leadership attributes of informal leaders were assessed using the Leader Attributes Inventory (LAI). Furthermore, the performance of informal leaders was measured using the Leader Effectiveness Index (LEI). Non-management employees from various departments in a manufacturing facility were placed in one of four experimental groups. A Solomon four-group experimental design was employed. A one-group pretest-posttest design was used to control threats to internal validity. The one-way analysis of variance procedure (ANOVA) was used to determine if there were statistically significant increases in manufacturing productivity of informal leaders. Findings suggested that training increased the manufacturing productivity of informal leaders. The increased productivity indicated that leadership training could help manufacturing facilities increase their productivity without capital expenditures. Findings did not indicate a statistically significant difference in leadership attributes. Findings also suggested there were no significant differences in the manufacturing productivity between employees with high leader attributes and low leader attributes. Based on this study, leadership training, given to non-management employees, may yield gains in manufacturing productivity.