In today’s competitive educational environment many colleges are branding their programs as “Career-Readyâ€, suggesting undergraduates are being prepared to enter the working world with progressive knowledge, skills, and leadership ability.

The purpose of our longitudinal study is to explore how students evolve their leadership skills and behaviors during their four year undergraduate tenure. We are completing this study in two phases.

In Phase I we provide training to a select group of students and ascertain how they understand their leadership.  The literature is replete with discussions of leadership in categories such as style, contingency, situation, or transformation (Northouse, 2010). For the purposes of our study we selected the framework of Kouzes and Posner’s (2012) identifying five behaviors of good leaders: model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. This will be used as the training for phase I. Data will collected through a leadership assessment and personal journals.

In Phase II we follow their progress over their undergraduate lifecycle and collect data pertaining to their leadership behaviors and skill use. The areas of interest tracked will be sports team activities, project teams, and clubs. From that data we will determine if students are applying and synthesizing the behaviors learned from the phase I training.