Pedagogy and Professional Development

Holding Hands for Walking or Pushing to Fly? Advisors' Leadership Styles to Train Future Faculty

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Abstract

Given the transitory state of being a student and a teacher at the same time, the development stage of graduate students can be challenging. Our understanding of how the advisors' leadership style affects graduate students' current and the future career success is very limited. This quantitative research was designed to identify the leadership styles (transformational and transactional) of advisors as perceived by current C&T graduate students. While results exhibit that today's C&T advisors exhibit high level of transformational leadership, the low rate of advisors' going beyond self-interest for the good of the group warns us of a lack of collaborative environments. Additionally, although hands on approach of advisors, was found to be prevalent in the discipline, "laissez faire" was not. Clearly, if the graduate students are not given the freedom to choose their own course of action, it will be challenging for them to be a successful independent faculty member.

How to Cite:

Raj, D. & Ha-Brookshire, J. E., (2016) “Holding Hands for Walking or Pushing to Fly? Advisors' Leadership Styles to Train Future Faculty”, International Textile and Apparel Association Annual Conference Proceedings 73(1).