Higher Education Students
OBJECTIVE The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between five specific leadership practices and the organizational commitment of MBA graduates.
METHODOLOGY The population consisted of 754 out of 811 of a small private university’s (in Iowa) MBA alumni who graduated from the years of 2000 through 2004, living in the U.S. Respondents completed the Leadership Practices Inventory - Observer and the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire (Mowday, Steers & Porter, 1979), and provided demographic information. The sample consists of 200 participants (26% response rate), of whom 104 were female (52%).
KEY FINDINGS Internal reliability for the LPI – Observer (all 30 items) in this study was 0.97. Significant correlations were found between all five leadership practices (Modeling, Inspiring, Challenging, Enabling and Encouraging) and Organizational Commitment, such that as respondents indicated greater frequency of these leadership practices by their leaders, the stronger was their level of organizational commitment.
“Thus, a statistically significant association between the five leadership practices and organizational commitment is possible not only with organizational members working for single employer, but also for a diverse group that is separated geographically and having different leaders and/or employers. That is to say significant results are obtainable even though many employers from different parts of the United States are included in the sample when testing the association between the five leadership practices as defined by Kouzes and Posner (1987) and organizational commitment as defined by Mowday, Steers, and Porter (1982)” (p. 89).