Leadership Behavior and Leader Identity in University Students

Abstract

With the increase of leadership education programs in universities, there is a need to examine relations of personal factors with leadership behavior of university students. The purpose of this study is to clarify the relations between university student’s leadership behavior and their leader identity based on quantitative data. In this study, we conducted an online questionnaire survey on 291 university students. We then performed path analysis on the data obtained from the survey to verify our hypotheses. As a result, we found that the relational and collective levels of leader identity have a positive association with the leadership behavior of the university students, and the collective level of leader identity have a stronger positive association with their Modeling, Challenge, Goal Sharing, and Goal Management leadership behaviors than the relational level of leader identity. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings and educational practice and future research directions.