Research has examined student leadership in positions within residence life (Andersen, 2000; Levy, 1995; Posner & Brodsky, 1993; Romero-Aldaz, 2001), Greek life (Adams & Keim, 2000; Posner & Brodsky, 1992; Posner & Brodsky, 1994) and student government (Astin, 1992; Downey, Bosco, & Silver, 1984; Kuh & Lund, 1994; Schuh & Laverty, 1983; Schwartz, 1991). Very little research has been done to examine the leadership of orientation leaders. The purpose of this study was to examine the leadership practices of orientation leaders, by exploring how they rated their own leadership practices and how those practices were rated by first-year matriculants in their orientation groups. Differences by level of experience (first-year v. experienced), race (Caucasian v. non-Caucasian), and gender (male v. female) were examined. Data were collected by administering the student versions of the Leadership Practices Inventory (Kouzes & Posner, 2005a, 2005b). These instruments evaluate leadership using the Kouzes and Posner (1987, 2002a) model. The samples included 30 leaders and 584 matriculants who participated in five selected orientation sessions at a large, public research institution in the United States. Overall, orientation leaders self-reported high engagement on all five scales while matriculants indicated moderate engagement by orientation leaders on all five scales. Significant differences were revealed in the ratings of orientation leaders by level of experience and gender. Significant differences were not found in the matriculants' ratings of orientation leaders by level of experience or race. Interaction effects of race and gender were revealed on all five scales of orientation leader ratings. / Master of Arts

This research examined leadership in difficult situations using phenomenological and critical incident analyses of 14 interviews with respected leaders. Leadership in difficult situations was examined as a personal experience consistent with the perspective of counselling psychology. The phenomenological analysis has produced four voices. The first voice captures the participants' description of leadership as a paradox of personal and situational dynamics. The second voice forms an uncommon elucidation of the lived experience of leadership in difficult situations. The participants are seen to be striving in a resilient manner characterized by a sense of acceptance and authenticity. The third and fourth voices describe the means by which the participants are effective in difficult situations. The third voice captures the intra-personal process of resonance, personal and social awareness, personal supports, mastery of the issues, and the capacity to generate remarkable outcomes. The fourth phenomenological voice captures the participant's active engagement in connecting with people, shaping the work context and leading collaboration to develop a successful process. Five categories have been produced by the Critical Incident Technique, which examined what helps and what hinders in the experience of leadership through difficult situations. The five categories are: being experienced, principled and self-aware; having personal supports and influences; being interested and skilled in connecting with people; being both energetic and able to withdraw appropriately; finally, actively cultivating their perspective or vision. These five categories indicate the capacity of the participants for diverse means of participation in difficult situations. Results are discussed in terms of implications for research and practice.

This research examined leadership in difficult situations using phenomenological and critical incident analyses of 14 interviews with respected leaders. Leadership in difficult situations was examined as a personal experience consistent with the perspective of counselling psychology. The phenomenological analysis has produced four voices. The first voice captures the participants' description of leadership as a paradox of personal and situational dynamics. The second voice forms an uncommon elucidation of the lived experience of leadership in difficult situations. The participants are seen to be striving in a resilient manner characterized by a sense of acceptance and authenticity. The third and fourth voices describe the means by which the participants are effective in difficult situations. The third voice captures the intra-personal process of resonance, personal and social awareness, personal supports, mastery of the issues, and the capacity to generate remarkable outcomes. The fourth phenomenological voice captures the participant's active engagement in connecting with people, shaping the work context and leading collaboration to develop a successful process. Five categories have been produced by the Critical Incident Technique, which examined what helps and what hinders in the experience of leadership through difficult situations. The five categories are: being experienced, principled and self-aware; having personal supports and influences; being interested and skilled in connecting with people; being both energetic and able to withdraw appropriately; finally, actively cultivating their perspective or vision. These five categories indicate the capacity of the participants for diverse means of participation in difficult situations. Results are discussed in terms of implications for research and practice.

This research examined leadership in difficult situations using phenomenological and critical incident analyses of 14 interviews with respected leaders. Leadership in difficult situations was examined as a personal experience consistent with the perspective of counselling psychology. The phenomenological analysis has produced four voices. The first voice captures the participants' description of leadership as a paradox of personal and situational dynamics. The second voice forms an uncommon elucidation of the lived experience of leadership in difficult situations. The participants are seen to be striving in a resilient manner characterized by a sense of acceptance and authenticity. The third and fourth voices describe the means by which the participants are effective in difficult situations. The third voice captures the intra-personal process of resonance, personal and social awareness, personal supports, mastery of the issues, and the capacity to generate remarkable outcomes. The fourth phenomenological voice captures the participant's active engagement in connecting with people, shaping the work context and leading collaboration to develop a successful process. Five categories have been produced by the Critical Incident Technique, which examined what helps and what hinders in the experience of leadership through difficult situations. The five categories are: being experienced, principled and self-aware; having personal supports and influences; being interested and skilled in connecting with people; being both energetic and able to withdraw appropriately; finally, actively cultivating their perspective or vision. These five categories indicate the capacity of the participants for diverse means of participation in difficult situations. Results are discussed in terms of implications for research and practice. / Education, Faculty of / Educational and Counselling Psychology, and Special Education (ECPS), Department of / Graduate

Concepts such as positive youth development, leadership self-efficacy, and social intelligence are salient to understanding how transformational leadership behaviors manifest in adolescents. The Youth Transformational Model exhibited in the current study establishes the positive relationship that leadership exposure (leadership experience and/or having a formal leadership role), leadership self-efficacy, and social intelligence have with transformational leadership skills (i.e. inspirational motivation and individualized consideration). High school-aged members of a youth leadership organization (N = 142) completed a survey on leadership factors and social intelligence. Leadership self-efficacy was the central component to the relationship between leadership exposure and behaviors. While having a formal leadership role was positively associated with leadership experience and self-efficacy, only leadership experience was related to leadership self-efficacy, social intelligence, and transformational leadership skills. Leadership self-efficacy and social intelligence partially mediated leadership experience and transformational leadership skills’ relationship. These findings suggest that acquiring formal titles and power do not automatically translate to being a considerate and motivational leader. Female participants possessed more positive leadership experiences and higher transformational leadership skills compared to males, yet the literature does not reflect the current findings. Transformational leadership encourages young people not to lead forcibly or from a distance, but to lead by example, care about others’ needs, be motivational, and bring out the best in people. Results highlight the importance of leadership training programs and opportunities for adolescents.

In the dominant management discourse, managers and consultants are credited with the ability to move their organisation in a planned, controlled way towards an idealised future. The assumptions underpinning this discourse include the following: organisations are thought of as systems that can be designed and steered in an intended direction; culture is seen as a control system to align employees’ conduct in support of the organisation’s strategy; consultants are viewed as experts in designing and implementing effective and efficient interventions, being on top of the process. These assumptions are grounded in the natural sciences of certainty, in which rational, formative and linear causality are presumed. I argue in this thesis, through a reflexive enquiry of my own practice, that these assumptions do not sufficiently resonate with my experience as an internal consultant on leadership and culture change. I am offering a critique of the dominant way of understanding organisations, culture and control, with the implication of coming to reappraise the involvement of a consultant in processes of culture change. In understanding organisations to be self-organising patterns of human interaction, culture is a social phenomenon, as it continually emerges as social control in the day-to-day local interactions of people making sense of experience. Using webs of significance, present in one’s personal history and in society, people interpret and give order to their life as they negotiate and evaluate their engagements together. In their engagement, participants will negotiate how to functionalise general values in particular situations that involve differences and can cause anxiety or even conflict. In this process of negotiation and evaluation, they are forming and being formed by each other. In this interaction no one is in control, determining in a predictable way what will happen. The participants have an influence that impacts on potential next steps in their interaction. An internal consultant’s involvement is in facilitating these processes of local interaction, enabling participants to have the conversations they tend not to have themselves, perhaps due to the anxiety of the interaction being unpredictable and predictable at the same time while no one is in control of the process or the outcome. A consultant is, as fellow participant, involved in the interaction while forming and being formed by it. He is at the same time detached: by inviting participants to work with and reflect on their experience of engaging, he enables reflexive awareness of what they are involved in together. The internal consultant, through temporary leadership, facilitates the conversation by focusing on the present, and working with differences, allowing the potential for novelty and change to occur. This temporary leadership is not a designated role or the authority of being the expert, but emerges in social interaction, through recognition and acceptance of participants acknowledging the consultant as leader in having a stronger influence than others. I propose that this alternative perspective does not offer a set of techniques, a causal framework to improve organisations in an intended and controlled way, as supposed in the dominant discourse. Rather, the perspective of complex responsive processes of relating enables a better understanding of human interaction processes; of culture emerging as social control and consulting as a social process, within the paradoxes of predictability and unpredictability, of being and not being in control, and of stability and change at the same time. It requires an internal consultant to assume a form of temporary leadership by enabling participants, through reflexive understanding of their experience, to be responsible in a critically aware manner of the ways in which they influence the next steps of engaging.

Community colleges have developed into vital resources for affordable, easy access, high quality education. Community college instructors with previous leader experience possess the credentials needed to teach their curricula and to lead learning experiences in the classroom. Researchers have found that instructors who display transformational leadership qualities can influence student actions, awareness, and learning outcomes. This study was conducted to explore community college faculty who possess transformational leadership qualities in relation to student extra effort, student perception of instructor effectiveness, and overall satisfaction with the instructor. The conceptual framework is the full range leadership theory which is one of the most broadly used comprehensive leadership theories. The measurement tool used was Avolio and Bass's (2004) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), which measures nine factors of leadership skills through a quantitative survey. These findings present support for the recognition of the value of transformational leadership in the community college environment. Consistent with the findings of this study, transformational leadership has been viewed as the most revered leadership model in the full range leadership theory. Instructors have the ability to integrate critical components of transformational leadership behaviors to impact the student experience in the classroom, resulting in higher levels of student outcomes of extra effort, effectiveness, and satisfaction. The findings add to the body of literature and provide insight into the leadership skills of community college instructors from previous business experience.

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<p>Civil society activism in traditional non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is seen as one of the cornerstones of a vibrant participatory liberal democracy in most Western democratic states. Whereas this issue has been explored from a variety of perspectives in a Western context, only limited research has been carried out in a post-Soviet context. This study presents unique survey data on civil society core activism in post-Soviet Latvia addressing the following two main questions: What are the characteristics and factors that influence a person to become a core activist in a civil society organization? How does the post-Soviet Latvian context influence civil society core activism?</p><p>Two nationwide surveys were carried out among core activists in all sorts of NGOs and for a comparative purpose among the population at large, from which non-activists have been extracted. Through cross-tabulations based on the three comparative dimensions: a) activists in general vs. non-activists, b) fields of interest and c) position in organization, this study indicates that many of the factors proven to be important when explaining civil society core activism in Western contexts also have explanatory power in post-Soviet Latvia. Important factors are an individual’s educational level, empathic ability and level of civic literacy, as well as the presence of activist role models and positive support for the decision to become involved in civil society activism. Citizenship and gender are other important factors, but unlike Western countries women dominate the civil society sector in Latvia. Two new factors are also suggested and tested, showing that the perception that one has the ability to organize activity and prior leadership experience from a communist organization are important for Latvian core activists.</p><p>Binary logistic regression analysis is further used to test the significance of each of the independent variables alone and in combination with each other, introducing different types of core activists based on gender, motives for activism, intensity of political, charity and recreational activity, as well as the positions they have in their organizations.</p>

Civil society activism in traditional non-governmental organizations (NGOs) is seen as one of the cornerstones of a vibrant participatory liberal democracy in most Western democratic states. Whereas this issue has been explored from a variety of perspectives in a Western context, only limited research has been carried out in a post-Soviet context. This study presents unique survey data on civil society core activism in post-Soviet Latvia addressing the following two main questions: What are the characteristics and factors that influence a person to become a core activist in a civil society organization? How does the post-Soviet Latvian context influence civil society core activism? Two nationwide surveys were carried out among core activists in all sorts of NGOs and for a comparative purpose among the population at large, from which non-activists have been extracted. Through cross-tabulations based on the three comparative dimensions: a) activists in general vs. non-activists, b) fields of interest and c) position in organization, this study indicates that many of the factors proven to be important when explaining civil society core activism in Western contexts also have explanatory power in post-Soviet Latvia. Important factors are an individual’s educational level, empathic ability and level of civic literacy, as well as the presence of activist role models and positive support for the decision to become involved in civil society activism. Citizenship and gender are other important factors, but unlike Western countries women dominate the civil society sector in Latvia. Two new factors are also suggested and tested, showing that the perception that one has the ability to organize activity and prior leadership experience from a communist organization are important for Latvian core activists. Binary logistic regression analysis is further used to test the significance of each of the independent variables alone and in combination with each other, introducing different types of core activists based on gender, motives for activism, intensity of political, charity and recreational activity, as well as the positions they have in their organizations.