Avolio and Vogelgesang (2011), in their work on leadership beginnings, noted that strategic leadership development efforts most likely start too late in the lifecycle to optimize the impact on genuine leadership development. Given this prompt and our own observations, our research team developed an instrument to explore individuals’ current and retrospective conceptualizations of leadership (and influences on those conceptualizations) so that we may inform college-level leadership work.
Our instrument was designed for distribution to (a) a sample of current George Mason University students (asking about pre-college and college leadership concepts) and (b) a sample of post-baccalaureate adults from a national population (asking about pre-college, college, and current leadership concepts). While the instrument will be deployed more fully to both students and the national participants in Spring 2020, our team expects preliminary findings from the national sample by early January 2020.
At this Symposium, we hope to share preliminary findings exploring how individuals define leadership and what shaped that thinking. We also expect to examine the link between pre- and college-based activities and leadership/leader development. These findings will, hopefully, contribute further to the thoughtful approach to college student leadership development that honors the whole student and their rich histories.
Click below to access individual session evaluation:Link to Individual Session Evaluation
