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 “We found that greater racial diversity in student
leadership programs led to a measurable increase in lasting
leadership capacity,” says Jasmine D. Collins, assistant professor
in the Agricultural Education Program and Department of Human
Development and Family Studies at U of I.
Collins and co-author David Rosch partnered with LeaderShape®
Institute™, a six-day immersive leadership development program for
college students, to collect demographic data and survey
participants before, immediately after completing the program, and
three to four months later. Thousands of students from across the
country participated in the study by taking part in 50 program
sessions between 2013 and 2015.
The researchers asked students to rate their own leadership capacity
in the surveys, and then analyzed their answers according to the
level of racial diversity in their program session. Leadership
capacity was assessed through eight metrics measuring leadership
confidence, motivation, and advocacy for social issues – a focus of
the LeaderShape curriculum.
“First, we wanted to know how diverse those sessions were,” Collins
says. “Were they primarily racially homogeneous or did we see some
diversity there? And are those diverse environments, those
cross-racial interactions, helping to make them better leaders?”
Greater diversity had a lasting impact on student leadership
capacity for three metrics related to a student’s motivation to
lead. Leadership motivation can be broken down in different ways: an
innate attraction to leadership positions when working in groups, a
willingness to lead without calculating “what’s in it for me,” and a
feeling of responsibility to others. In the study, more diversity in
the session led to higher scores for all three of these.
Those results were true for all participants; that
is, regardless of the race of the survey respondent, everyone had
higher leadership motivation scores if their leadership program was
more diverse.
Participating in a high-diversity session had a
greater lasting effect on white students’ social-normative
motivation to lead – that feeling of wanting to lead out of a
responsibility to others – than for non-white students. That is,
white students seemed to be more affected by the degree of racial
diversity in a session, on this measure in particular, than
non-white students.
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To really explain this result, Collins says it would be useful to
conduct interviews or observe students during the leadership programs. However,
another one of her recent studies – also looking at LeaderShape participants –
might offer some clues.
“In that study, black male participants were already coming into the program
pretty high on the social-normative motivation to lead measure. That’s
consistent with research that says students of color join organizations because
they see problems that are affecting their communities and have this sense of
responsibility to use their education and skills to benefit their community.”
She says white students might have shown greater gains in leadership motivation
because, for many of them, the experience of interacting with a more diverse
population may be new. They may stand to benefit more because they may be
starting off in a different place than their non-white peers with regard to
those interactions.
But, she emphasizes, the benefit of diversity on long-lasting leadership
capacity applied to everyone in the study.
“In the literature, we see that students who engage in cross-racial interactions
have greater openness to diversity, greater cognitive development throughout
their coursework, are more civically engaged, and are more socially aware,”
Collins says.
Collins recommends that organizers of student leadership programs should be very
intentional about their recruitment processes to ensure a broader range of
people are included.
“Especially on predominantly white campuses, it would be important for
recruiters to go to where the students of color may gravitate, such as their
Greek organizations or cultural centers,” she says.
The article, “Longitudinal leadership capacity growth among participants of a
leadership immersion program: How much does structural diversity matter?” is
published in the Journal of Leadership Education [DOI: 10.12806/V17/I3/R10].
Collins’ co-author David Rosch is an associate professor in the Agricultural
Education Program at U of I.
[Jasmine Collins
Researcher Jasmine Collins] |
