Religious Employees/Individual Contributors/Members/Adults
OBJECTIVE The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental research, using a pretest/posttest control group design was to examine if a leaders identification of learning styles contributed to effective leader-follower interaction between church directors and their direct reports.
METHODOLOGY There were two categories of participants in this study, all from the First United Methodist Church in North Texas. These included 10 church directors and 74 full-time employees. The directors were divided into two groups, control and experimental. The experimental group was expected to participate in an intervention. They were purposefully selected to attend instruction on learning style theory. The focus of the instruction was on Gregorc’s (2006) Mind Style Theory. The second category of participants was the 74 full time direct reports of all 10 directors. These participants were expected to complete a pretest survey using the Leadership Practices Inventory a week prior to the intervention and again three months after the intervention. Complete data from both administrations of the LPI were rather small.
KEY FINDINGS In the control group there were no statistically significant differences in LPI scores from the pre and post-administrations of the LPI. In the experimental group, LPI scores at time 2 were consistently higher than those at time 1 and reached statistical significance for Model, Challenge and Encourage.