The relationship between gender, presidential leadership, and the quality of community colleges

Access restricted to the OSU CommunityPurpose. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of presidential leadership style according to gender on the quality of community colleges. The proposed path is modeled as follows: gender-> presidential leadership style-> the quality of community colleges. Methodology. The study uses the survey methodology to analyze data collected from 82 faculty members in 10 California community colleges. Presidential leadership effectiveness, specifically transformational leadership, is measured using the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Bass & Avolio, 2000). Transformational leadership includes idealized influence, inspiration motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individual consideration (Bass, 1998). The quality of community colleges includes input quality and outcome quality. Input quality includes faculty quality and equipment quality. Faculty quality is measured using the percentage of full-time faculty and the student-faculty ratio. Equipment quality is measured using computer-student ratio and library books-student ratio. Outcome quality is measured using student transfer rates and graduation rates. Findings. The results of the study show that a difference between male presidents and female presidents in transformational leadership was not found. However, transformational leadership was associated with the quality of community colleges. There was a significant relationship between transformational leadership and the quality of community colleges, including total quality and input quality. However, there was not a significant relationship between transformational leadership and outcome quality. At the college level, there was no significant relationship between gender of presidents and the quality of community colleges, including total quality, input quality, and outcome quality. Considering the perceptions of individual faculty members, there was a difference in favor of male presidents on total quality and outcome quality. Conclusions. The results indicate that the transformational leadership model can lead to the improvement of quality in community colleges for both male and female presidents