Accepted into a Doctoral Program!

[LiquidMidnight]

I recieved an email from the department of the secretary of the program I applied to. I've been accepted into a PhD program! Sorry about the bragginess, but I just had to make the proclamation. Now, I just have to wait and hear if I'm going to be offered an assistanceship.

This is pretty exciting for me, because my GRE scores are teh suck. I guess having a decent CV and showing I can do research as evidenced by my Master's thesis goes a long way.

[iamlowsound]

Nice, what field of study?

lowsound

[RWP]

That is awesome. Good luck!

[LiquidMidnight]

Leadership Studies - my research interest ever since undergrad has been in leadership. My BS is in psychology with a field of interest in industrial/organizational psychology. I wrote my Master's thesis on gender being a moderating variable that affects people's perceptions of efficacy of transformational and transactional leaders.

[username n/a]

Originally Posted by LiquidMidnight

Leadership Studies - my research interest ever since undergrad has been in leadership. My BS is in psychology with a field of interest in industrial/organizational psychology. I wrote my Master's thesis on gender being a moderating variable that affects people's perceptions of efficacy of transformational and transactional leaders.

Your words make my head hurt.

[FL Knifemaker]

Originally Posted by iamlowsound

Nice, what field of study?

lowsound

Rocket Doctor??

Congrats man!! That IS good news.

[RWP]

Originally Posted by LiquidMidnight

Leadership Studies - my research interest ever since undergrad has been in leadership. My BS is in psychology with a field of interest in industrial/organizational psychology. I wrote my Master's thesis on gender being a moderating variable that affects people's perceptions of efficacy of transformational and transactional leaders.

What does that have to do with bass?

[smperry]

Congratulations!

Originally Posted by LiquidMidnight

I wrote my Master's thesis on gender being a moderating variable that affects people's perceptions of efficacy of transformational and transactional leaders.

Did you look at the gender of the person perceiving and the gender of the leader? Was there some sort of valuation of which perceptions were off-base (meaning, someone was transformational but not viewed as such) or just determine that there was a difference? Sounds like an interesting study.

I'm probably preaching to the converted, but that's a great field of study. Leadership principles, organizational mechanisms and policies have implicit theories of action based upon psychological assumptions (beliefs about what motivates people and/or changes their behavior.) For that reason, I took a good amount of psychology in my doctoral studies and created my own minor in political psychology.

rock on.

[Mazatleco17]

Congrats!!

[drteeth]

Congratulations!

[UnsungZeros]

Congrats!

I just got accepted into a master's program myself.

[cassanova]

Congrats. I'm contemplating going on for a PHD in some form of psychology when I finish my Masters.

[hrodbert696]

+1 congrats. Welcome to the long and winding road of academia. Don't wander off the path picking any flowers!

[drteeth]

Originally Posted by hrodbert696

+1 congrats. Welcome to the long and winding road of academia. Don't wander off the path picking any flowers!

But do stop to smell them once in a while.

[P. Aaron]

Awesome! Congratulations!

[LiquidMidnight]

Originally Posted by smperry

Did you look at the gender of the person perceiving and the gender of the leader?

I looked at both participants' gender and leaders' gender. Interestingly, my hypotheses looking at participants' gender were confirmed (i.e., gender of participant was predictive of perceptions of leader effectiveness); however, there was no statistically significant effect of leader gender. Granted, I didn't have enough participants for optimal power with my research design, so there could have been a possibility of type II error when looking at leader gender.

In short, I found that while both males and females percieved transformational leaders overall as more effective than transactional leaders, females had much larger effect sizes associated with their ratings. Therefore, females rated transformational leaders more positively than male's rated transformational leaders.

Was there some sort of valuation of which perceptions were off-base (meaning, someone was transformational but not viewed as such) or just determine that there was a difference? Sounds like an interesting study.

The IVs of leadership style were two vignettes taken from a previous study presenting either a transformational or transactional leader (the gender of the leader presented in these vignettes was manipulated). The vignettes had good content and discriminant validity. I did do a manipulation check for the leader gender variable and found that most participants picked up on the gender of the leader. I didn't do a manipulation check for the leader profiles because I felt that there was quite a bit of discriminant validity with them.

Most management and leader evaluation instruments are meant to be used when the rater has a history with the person being rated. Therefore, I had to create DVs that would be used to rate leaders that participants had just read about. I stuck with general items for rating the leaders. I couldn't, for example, ask participants to rate a leader on his or her charisma, because then they may be rating the construct of idealized influence for transformational leaders rather than rating general effectiveness of the leader. I think the DVs have good construct validity but they probably don't have real high content validity. I don't think that's problematic, though, because the study was just looking for discrepancies in participants' ratings between two leaders. The DVs weren't meant to be a fully validated performance appraisal instrument to be used in the real world.

I'm probably preaching to the converted, but that's a great field of study. Leadership principles, organizational mechanisms and policies have implicit theories of action based upon psychological assumptions (beliefs about what motivates people and/or changes their behavior.) For that reason, I took a good amount of psychology in my doctoral studies and created my own minor in political psychology.

rock on.

Indeed! I think leadership studies is a great field and I love how interdisciplinary it is. I also really like how its contingent upon both qualitative and quantitative research. For example, take the two big scholars on transformational leadership, George McGregor Burns and Bernard Bass. Burns is a political scientist, so he takes on a more qualitative approach to studying leadership, borrowing heavily from history and critical theory. Bass was an I/O psychologist, so he was much more quantitative and he was instrumental in opertionally defining a lot of the behaviors that make up the transformational and transactional leadership profiles.

[jazzbo]

Congratulations LM. I know we've talked quite a bit about each other's studies. You'll have to keep me informed about the process.

You're in for a wild ride my friend. It will be more work than you've ever known, and the work will be more rewarding. Take it seriously, work hard. But also, remember that self-care is incredibly important.

For me, it's been a tremendous sense of accomplishment, yet, it's also been extremely humbling.

[i_got_a_mohawk]

Congrats! Tho I'm at the current level of wishing I hadn't started (1st year report to work on ).

And it is good fun working on an interdisciplinary subject, I'm doing much the same, except in the hard sciences.

[wazzel]

Congrats and good luck. Hope you do well.

[Webtroll]

Grats! Just remember it's NOT a tumor and it's NOT lupus!