Applicacion del Inventario de Practicas de Liderazgo en Gerentes y Empleados de Empresas Mexicanas (Applying the Leadership Practices Inventory on Managers and Employees at Mexican Companies)

OBJECTIVE
To develop a Spanish-language version of the Leadership Practices Inventory and to examine its reliability as applied to a group of Mexican managers.

METHODOLOGY
The sample involved 83 people, including 22 managers and their subordinates (24 men and 37 women). The manager's average age was 37 years. More than two-thirds of all respondents held university degrees. About 10 percent of the subordinates had been working with their manager for over three years and another 32 percent had been working with their manager between one to three years. The tenure of the remainder was less than one year, but a minimum of one month.

KEY FINDINGS
Internal reliability (standardized Cronbach Alphas) for the five leadership scales ranged from .81 to .89. Managers reported significantly higher scores on Enabling and Encouraging than reported by their constituents, and there were no statistically significant differences between these two groups on Challenging, Inspiring, or Modeling. In a relative sense, the leadership practices of Encouraging and Inspiring were engaged in least frequently by Mexican managers. Significant differences were not found between male and female managers on the LPI-Self; and male and female constituents were significantly different only on the Modeling practice (with men providing higher assessments than females). Higher scores were generally found on all five leadership practices as a function of the length of working experience between the managers and their subordinates. Respondent age did not affect LPI scores. Overall, leadership scores of Mexican managers were, on average, lower than their U.S. counterparts but in the same relative order.

More than seven professionals were involved in the English-to-Spanish, and Spanish-to-English, translations and re-translations of the LPI using an iterative process until complete agreement was reached. Through these efforts the author concludes: "...meanings of the LPI in Spanish are valid and reliable among the Mexican population."

NOTE
This thesis is available only in Spanish.