Abstracts Category : Other

Relationship of Employee's Perception of Administrator's Leadership Style and Their Perceived Empowerment

by Matthew Lynn Pettis

The purpose of the quantitative correlational study was to research the relationship between leadership styles of higher education administrators and their faculty and staffs perceived psychological empowerment. The theoretical foundations are based around the Full Range Leadership model and Psychological Empowerment models. The Full Range Leadership model includes three specific leadership styles of transformational, transactional, and laissez-faire. The study was comprised of three research questions, which were designed to determine the relationship of each of the leadership styles with perceived psychological empowerment. The research was undertaken at a public higher education institution in upstate New York. The sample for the study included 72 faculty and staff participants. Individual leadership styles were correlated with individual faculty and staffs psychological empowerment using a Spearmans rank-order correlation. The findings indicated that transformational leadership style has the greatest positive influence on faculty and staffs psychological empowerment (<i>rs</i> = .38, <i> p</i> = .001). However, for this study there was not a significant correlation between transactional leadership and perceived psychological empowerment (<i> rs</i> = .15, <i>p</i> = .10). There was a negative correlation between laissez-faire leadership and perceived psychological empowerment (<i>rs</i> = -.36, <i>p</i> = .001). It can be stated that this research further supports that transformational leadership of administrators results in the highest levels of faculty and staff psychological empowerment.