Investigation of College Students’ Capability of Self-Leadership

Abstract

Self-leadership means, in a common sense, “the process of leading one’s self with the achievements of individual and organizational success for gaining self- motivation.” Self-leadership is also a concept that is linked and nested with one’s self- motivating efforts. Self-leadership forms the basis of participative leadership as a type of leadership closely associated with the perception of gaining benefits from oneself. So primarily people should be able to lead themselves and, later on, they must be able to share the process with other individuals. Researchers seem to have adopted three self-leading strategies including behavior- oriented, natural reward, and creative idea model strategies. In the present study, private and public sector employees of different fields of operation were evaluated applying self-leadership scales. The objective of the study is to compare the self-leadership abilities of students from various university departments. In the study, factors affecting self-leadership were determined by implementing the self-leadership scale to 148 students from different departments. In addition, a reliability and factor analysis tests were conducted. In results of the study, Cronbach’s-Alfa rates were determined as 0.89 for all subjects, which is highly reliable. The number of the factors were gathered under 8 titles in the Turkish version of the scale while the original had 9 factors. In the present study, the factors “determining the target” and “evaluating opinions/ideas” were excluded, and the items were gathered under 7 factors. These factors include imagination of successful performance, self-punishment, assigning reminders for yourself, talking to yourself, self-observation, focusing on natural awards, and the reliability coefficients of these factors are respectively 0.868, 0.761, 0.742, 0.819, 0.783, 0.712 and 0.767. Moreover, in scope of the study, the researcher analyzed the self-leadership abilities of the departments, and observed significant differences on self-leadership abilities considering demographic and departmental differences.

Keywords

• Self-leadership,Leadership of oneself,Leading oneself,Leadership abilities

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