Exploring the Relationship Between Learning Styles and Leadership Styles: A Study in the United Arab Emirates
Darwish Abdulrahman Yousef
United Arab Emirates University, UAE
Volume 12: 2017, pp. 83-106; ABSTRACT
This study seeks to explore the relationship between managers’ learning styles and leadership styles. Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ) was used to identify managers’ learning styles, and Bass and Avolio’s Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) was used to identify their leadership styles. One hundred and forty-one questionnaires were completed by managers of local government departments of the Ras Al Khaimah (RAK) emirate in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The study used descriptive and inferential statistics to analyze the collected data. The results demonstrated that participating managers have a moderate preference for the activist learning style, a strong preference for the reflector and pragmatist learning styles and a very strong preference for the theorist learning style. Furthermore, participating managers exhibited transformational and transactional leadership behaviors fairly often, and passive avoidant leadership behavior once in a while. There are statistically significant differences in the mean scores across the four learning styles due to certain managers’ demographics. On the other hand, there are only limited differences in the mean scores across the three leadership behaviors due to managers’ demographics. There are also statistically significant correlations between learning styles and certain constructs of the three leadership styles. Implications, limitations and lines of future studies are discussed.
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