Developing a Leadership Model for Enhancing Leadership Characteristics of Thai Salesian Students

Leadership involves inspiring, influencing, and directing people to work together to achieve goals and objectives. Student leaders need to enhance their leadership characteristics to help them be better and thrive in the future. Relatively, students are trained to develop their holistic growth with the mission and uniqueness of the Salesian Society Foundation of Thailand. Therefore, this study aimed in developing a model to enhance Thai Salesian students' characteristics. The study was conducted in all five schools under the Salesian Society Foundation of Thailand with a sample size of 351 students. The research applied qualitative and quantitative methods designed with qualitative data from the literature resources to create questionnaires and experts' qualitative interview data to triangle data in developing a mode with activities enhancing characteristics. The findings resulted in seven leadership characteristics of Thai Salesian students: commitment, communication, inspiration, morality, teamwork, service mind, and vision. Based on the questionnaire to find the needs for improvement priority index, the study disclosed that among Thai Salesian students, leadership characteristics that needed priority improvement were ranked as follows: (1) teamwork, (2) commitment, (3) inspiration, (4) vision, (5) service mind, (6) communication, and (7) morality. As a result, the four leadership characteristics that need to be developed are teamwork, commitment, inspiration, and vision.