Investigation of College Students’ Capability of Self-Leadership

Year 2018, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 32 - 39, 31.12.2018

Hakan Kör , Hasan Erbay Melih Engin , Hamit Aksoy

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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