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Dissertation Abstract: Felicia Mainella

Source: Dissertation Abstracts. Publisher contact: 300 N. Zeeb Rd., PO Box 1346, Ann Arbor, MI 48106-1346

Written at the University of Maryland (College Park), 2003
Advisor: Susan R. Komives
206 pages

This study examined the role of moral reasoning in transformational leadership by exploring the relationship between college student leaders' leadership behaviors and level of moral reasoning. Differences were also investigated based on the participants' sex or type of organization. Participants were 74 undergraduate student leaders from a large East Coast public university, who were presidents from four types of student organizations. The four types of student organizations included: Greek, sports club, cultural, and political/advocacy. The Leadership behaviors were measured through the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ Form 5x - short (Bass & Avolio, 2000). Moral reasoning was measured through the newest version of the Defining Issues Test (DIT2). Along with the two instruments, the participants also completed a demographic survey.

The study found that moral reasoning was significantly negatively correlated to three of the nine leadership factors: idealized influence-attributed, inspirational motivation, and management by exception-active. In regards to leadership behaviors, no differences by sex were revealed. However, differences in leadership behaviors did exist by type of organization. For idealized influence-attributed, Greek presidents had a significantly higher score than cultural presidents. Political/advocacy presidents had a significantly higher score than sports club presidents on the leadership factor, idealized influence-behavioral. For intellectual stimulation, both Greek presidents and cultural presidents had significantly higher scores than sports club presidents. For moral reasoning (N2 score), there was no statistically significant difference for sex or type of organization. However, exploratory post-hoc analysis revealed that political/advocacy presidents had a significantly higher moral reasoning score (N2) than Greek presidents and sports club presidents.

Except for inspirational motivation, sex and moral reasoning did not significantly account for the variance in transformational leadership behaviors. Moral reasoning was found to be more significantly predictive of the variance in inspirational motivation after holding sex constant. Due to the low instrument reliability coefficients for the study's sample, all of the results need to be interpreted with caution.