Learning Styles Preferences of Managers at Local Government Departments: A Study in the Emirate of
Ras Al Khaimah (UAE)
Darwish Abdulrahman Yousef
United Arab Emirates University, UAE
Volume 10: 2015, pp. 137-154; ABSTRACT
This study is designed to explore the learning styles preferences of the managers at local government departments in the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah (RAK), the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It also probes whether there are statistically significant differences in the learning styles preferences of managers due to gender, nationality, age, education level, experience in the present job, tenure in present department, managerial position and marital status. For this aim, a structured questionnaire survey, based on Honey and Mumford’s (1986) Learning Style Questionnaire (LSQ), was used to collect data from 72 participating managers at local government departments of the Emirate of Ras Al Khaimah and obtained scores for the four learning styles, namely activist, theorist, reflector, and pragmatist. We used descriptive statistics such as frequencies, percentages, means and standard deviations to present the main characteristics of participating managers and the results of the study. Additionally, t-test, Mann Whitney test and Kruskall-Wallis were used to test the hypotheses of the study. Results suggested that participating managers have strong preferences in the activist, reflector, theorist and pragmatist categories. Results further showed that 79% of participating managers have strong to very strong preferences for theorist learning style, 72% for reflector learning style, 65% for pragmatist learning style, and 53% for activist learning style. Results also revealed that there are no statistically significant differences in the learning styles of the participating managers due to gender, nationality (except for activist and reflector learning styles), age (except for activist, reflector and pragmatist learning styles), education level, experience in the present job (except for theorist learning style), tenure in present department, managerial position (except for activist learning style) and marital status (except for pragmatist learning style).
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