The Relationship of Leadership Style to Interpersonal Relations and Organizational Climate in a Community College.

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to determine whether style of leadership, as perceived by selected groups within a community college, influenced the groups' perceptions of either the interpersonal relations between the college's provosts and themselves or the college's organizational climate. The data were collected from a stratified r and om sample of 331 faculty, staff and students from the four campuses of a southern U.S. community college using slightly modified versions of the Leadership Behavior Description Questionnaire (Halpin and Winer, 1952), The Social Distance Scale (Westie, 1959) and the Bipolar Adjective Scale (Lawler, Hall and Oldham, 1974). The Chi-square results, which included computation of the Cramer's V and the Goodman-Kruskal gamma statistics, generally indicate that the perception of the provosts' leadership styles was weakly related to the perceived interpersonal relations between the provosts and respondents. The association of the college's perceived organizational climate with the perception of the provosts' leadership styles was moderately weak. When moderated by such factors as position, campus, sex, race and age, the associations among the principal variables fluctuate between weak and strong. The results of Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA), a dummy variable regression technique, suggest that the perception of the provosts' leadership styles (consideration and initiation of structure), campus affiliation and age were better predictors of the perception that the provosts were socially distant, than of the perception that the provosts were socially close. Neither of the perceived leadership style dimensions, nor the demographic factors seemed to differentiate the respondents very well with regard to their perception of the social closeness of the provosts. The perception of the provosts' leadership styles, the perception of the provosts' interpersonal relations, and the demographic factors were more able to predict, in descending order, the perception of the competence-potency, responsibleness, impulsiveness and risk orientation of the college's organizational climate, than its practicalness. Of the nine predictor variables, respondents' perceptions of the provosts as initiators of structure and as being socially distant, as well as respondents' age, campus affiliation and position status were generally more important than respondents' race and sex, or their perceptions of the provosts as considerate and socially close in accounting for the variation in their perception of the college's organizational climate.