Informal Leadership and Intent to Stay Among University Students

• In Event: 66.058 - Applying Complexity Perspectives on Educational Research

Abstract

This proposal asks whether a PhD student’s level of informal leadership affects their intent to stay in a degree program. Informal leaders are defined as agents who promote, process and share a system’s information thus generating creativity, learning and adaptability. Informal leadership is framed with complexity leadership theory and measured by social network analysis. The numerous measures of informal leadership produced by network analysis were winnowed by stepwise regression and then entered into a multiple regression. Findings indicate that intent to stay is promoted by agents who collaborate on class projects with agents who collaborate widely, by ability to access information, by homophilous knowledge, and (negatively) by students who are not selected as possible candidates for independent research.

Authors

• Russ Marion, Clemson University

• Gemma Jiang, University of Pittsburgh