| The purpose of this mixed-methods study was to identify and explore the leadership style preferences among current African American Administrators of the 1890 Land-Grant Cooperative Extension system. The population used in this study was African American women administrators from eighteen mostly southern states. The researcher used a "two-phase model" (Creswell, 2005, p. 516), in which data was collected in two stages. Relationships between personal, professional characteristics, and leadership style preferences were examined. In Stage I of the study, 18 study participants completed two standard survey instruments, the Bass and Avolio (2000b) developed Multi-Factor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ), which measures three leadership styles and the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) developed by Kouzes, J., & Posner, B. (1997), which measures the five practices of exemplary leadership framework and a researcher developed demographic questionnaire, which was used to collect participant personal and professional demographic characteristics. Quantitative research data was entered and analyzed using Minitab for Windows version 14.0. The researcher calculated both descriptive and correlation statistics to meet the research objectives. Correlation between summative scores of the LPI-SELF and MLQ and personal, professional characteristics were also calculated and charted to output accordingly. The regression analyses of both surveys revealed the institution location had a strong influence on the participants' transformational leadership style preferences. Results of the MLQ analysis suggested that the state served as a strong predator that the participants exhibited transformational leadership styles, due to leadership style accounting for over half of the constructs' statistical variance. To further clarify participant's leadership style preferences, Stage 2 of the study involved conducting telephone interviews with 4 of the study participants. Interview responses were entered into Nvivo8 qualitative software, which helped to chart, organize, and code data to easily analyze like concepts and responses. Multiple regression was used to examine statistical relationships between participants' leadership characteristics and demographic characteristics. Participants reported engaging in transformational leadership more often than transactional leadership. Although there was a statistical significance within the LPI constructs, the location of the institution was not a strong predictor of participants that exhibited the five practices of leadership as outlined by Kouzes and Posner (1997). |
