Understanding leadership development for young people: creating a multi-dimensional and holistic framework for emerging high-school students as future leaders in KSA
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Date
01/07/2015Author
Almohaimeed, Saleh Abdulaziz
Metadata
Abstract
This thesis concerned with understanding what makes young people as future
leaders. It sets out to explore leadership development for secondary school students
(12-to-18-year), focussing on what makes young leaders and how they become future
leaders. The fundamental purpose of this explanatory and exploratory qualitative
study was to investigate leadership development at the age of adolescence. There are
three key objectives for this study: (1) to explore and investigate what contributes to
forming young people as future leaders; (2) to clarify and understand how young
people become future leaders; and (3) to create a multidimensional and holistic
framework for developing secondary students as future leaders.
These aims were achieved via conducting qualitative in-depth interviews (N=46)
with established leaders (N=19) and university professors (N=27) in both the UK and
the kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Additionally, as this study focuses on
adolescence, it was important to conduct three focus groups with secondary school
students in KSA (N=27). Succinctly this study aims to deepen our understanding of
the issue of developing young people as future leaders. This study used multi-levels
of analysis and multi-domains of purposive sampling via using maximal variation
sampling, both leaders and academics are categorised into six domains (business,
education, social, voluntary sector, YLD programmes directors, and developmental
psychologists). The secondary school students were selected from government
school, private school, and gifted students.
Due to the extensive sample gathered (46 interviews and 3 focus groups) and
significant data generated (287.000 words), the author’s study produces both
emergent themes and abundant numerical results. However, these large quantities
can encourage various quantitative studies in the future. There are several key
contributions of value in this study; (1) creating and conceptually testing a
comprehensive framework to develop young people as future leaders; (2) the
theoretical contribution as the qualitative analysis has generated massive number of
new emergent themes related to the research questions; (3) analysis of the empirical
contributions revealed lots of variables, factors, criteria, tools; (4) a cross-cultural
YLD which verify that there are both differences and similarities between the UK
and KSA; (5) the findings proved that leadership for young people is learnable to a
great extent; that adolescence is a critical period for developing leaders; that sparking
the motivation to lead is important at this age; there are serious obstacles facing
YLD; generic leadership is more applicable for YLD; and finally, one of the
significant contributions of this study is its focussing of attention on a long-term
approach for young people leadership development.
The further contribution of this study is creating a multi-dimensional and holistic
framework for YLD based on theories of adult leadership and intensively reviewing
the literature review on YLD. It has been developed via pilot study and finally
developed and validated throughout a cohort of stablished leaders and university
professors (N=41).
This study’s findings can benefit policy and practice to a great extent since it focuses
on the secondary school students; as they are the future leaders, this study can be of
significant help to the strategic planning of policy makers in the Ministry of
Education, Youth Ministry, and generally within the political context, family
business. This study inspires me to establish a leadership-based academy, which
focuses on high-school students and develops them as national leaders.
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