Using SPSS to Understand Research and Data Analysis.

4.3 Overview of Major Variables

EZ Manufacturing execs have asked you to draw upon research in this area to conduct your study in their organization, hoping that your research will help them determine what types of individuals (both men and women) are most likely to be effective leaders. You identify two areas of research that have been related to leadership effectiveness:

• Gender and Sex Role Stereotypes
• Leadership Style and Work Motives

In a general sense we can think of these as predictor variables. That is, we may want to see if these variables predict some criterion, or outcome variable. The outcome variable we want to predict is Leader Performance Effectiveness., so we are interested in discovering how these variables might be related to effective leader behavior.

The first area, Gender and Sex Roles, concerns the extent to which men and women internalize societal stereotypes about masculinity and femininity in their self concepts. This research is relevant to your planned project in leadership positions have traditionally been traditionally occupied by men and have been associated with masculine personality characteristics.

The second topic, Leadership Style concerns the extent to which a person exhibits task skills and/or social skills in leadership situations. The third area, Work Motives, concerns the extent to which a person strives to fill needs for affiliation, achievement and dominance in the work setting. Both leadership style and motivation are directly relevant to how well a leader performs.

Thus, you determine that it might be useful to investigate all of these variables and their interrelationships as predictors of leadership performance at EZ Manufacturing. Figure 4.1 graphically depicts the interrelationships among these variables.

Figure 4.1

The two-way arrow between the sets of predictor variables indicates that we will be examining interrelationships among them. The one-way arrows indicate that we will be investigating how leader performance varies as a function of the two sets of predictor variables. In the next section we discuss the operational definitions of these variables, and explain how they were measured.