Leadership Education: possible ways of learning leadership skills for future leaders

Abstract: In this postindustrial era, organizations have realized a dire need to have work force with leadership skills in order to maintain their competitive edge in the market place. This has stretched the scope of leadership education to diverse field of studies and has raised the number of leadership education programs offered in colleges and universities all over the world. This thesis is an exploratory study to identify key features of leadership education that distinguish it from conventional educational programs. In view of key early career challenges faced by graduates, research hypotheses were generated regarding the role played by different type of leadership educators and various means employed for leadership education. In order to test the research hypotheses web based questionnaire was distributed among 72 students of three Master Programs at Linnaeus University, Sweden, of whom 32 responded, giving an overall response rate of 44.4%. Among the three Master Programs, two offer leadership education while one offers courses in business strategy and marketing. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with the program directors of three Master Programs. The commercial statistical software GraphPad Prism version 5.04 was employed for statistical analysis of the data. The results have showed a clear distinction of perceptions among the students of two types of programs, one that offer leadership education and other that do not, in terms of role of different type of leadership educators and various means employed for leadership education. It has been concluded that leadership programs have helped in developing the leadership mindset and vital leadership skills.