Term of Award

Summer 2007

Degree Name

Doctor of Education in Education Administration (Ed.D.)

Document Type and Release Option

Dissertation (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Leadership, Technology, and Human Development

Committee Chair

Barbara Mallory

Committee Member 1

Randal Carlson

Committee Member 2

Fayth Parks

Abstract

Two-year colleges face a leadership shortage in the next decade. Those who lead two-year colleges need to be prepared to meet challenges of the 21st century and demands of the institution internally and externally, of new technology, and of curriculum. Research led by the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) has resulted in the identification of six leadership competencies needed for the two-year college presidency: organizational strategy; resource management; communication, collaboration, advocacy, and professionalism. To determine sitting two-year college presidents' ranking of those competencies, the researcher adapted an AACC survey that was sent to 425 two-year college presidents in the Southern Regional Educational Board service area. Using the Freidman two-way analysis of variance by ranks led the researcher to reject the hypothesis that the competencies were equal; thus the researcher used the Wilcoxon signed ranks test to determine where the differences were located. The major finding indicated that organizational strategy is relatively more important than resource management, communication, collaboration, and professionalism in the current role of leading two-year institutions. 2 To determine if institutional or individual factors affected those rankings, the researcher used the Mann-Whitney test and the Kruskall-Wallis test to detect group differences in the rankings. When considering how the factors of gender, institution size by Carnegie classification, or length of tenure affected the relative importance of the competencies, female two-year college presidents consider organizational strategy and communication relatively more important than male two-year presidents. Regardless of institution size, the six competencies were equal. Resource management is relatively more important to two-year presidents who have served 4-10 years. Further investigation needs to be done on how the competencies are being used by two-year institutions of higher education, non-degree leadership programs, and staff development trainers.

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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