Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Publication Date

6-21-1978

Abstract

This study examined the relationships among latent social identities of small liberal arts college faculty mem­bers and the social power bases of the academic dean. For many years, Gouldner's (1957) cosmopolitan-local construct, which conceptualizes cosmopolitan and local latent social identities in organizational participants, was utilized by researchers to explain differing organizational loyalties, professional commitments, and reference group orientations among professionals. Recent studies have indicated, how­ever, that two mixed types, the local-cosmopolitan and the indifferent, should join the cosmopolitan and the local to form a fourfold typology of latent social role (e.g., Goldberg et al., 1965; Delbecq and Elfner, 1970; Miller and Wager, 1971; Sheldon, 1971). The fourfold cosmopolitan­local typology was used as the conceptual base relative to latent social identities in this study,

The fourfold typology suggests differing commitments, loyalties, and values among cosmopolitan, local, local-cosmopolitan, and indifferent faculty members which would appear to influence their perceptions of leader social power bases as reasons for compliance. French and Raven's (1968) social power theory, which is based on the perception of the influenced, was used as the theoretical framework relative to social power in this research. French and Raven identify five bases of social power, i.e., legitimate power, reward power, coercive power, referent power, and expert power.

The target population for this study consisted of all full-time faculty members at six liberal arts colleges belonging to associations of private colleges in two adja­cent states. Of 412 questionnaires mailed, 286 usable questionnaires were returned and were utilized in the data analysis. Adaptations of two scales (Kerr, 1972) were used to measure latent social role orientations, and an adapta­tion of an instrument developed by Bachman (1968) and Bachman et al. (1968) was utilized to measure perceptions of social power. Data were analyzed through the applica­tion of the Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance by ranks, Dunn's multiple comparison procedure for rank sums, and chi square tests.

In order to determine differences among latent social role types relative to social power, it was first necessary to generate the fourfold typology from questionnaire responses. All four role types, i.e., the cosmopolitan, the local, the local-cosmopolitan, and the indifferent, emerged in the distribution. The presence of all four role types pr1ovides support for the elaboration of cosmopoli­tanism-localism as a fourfold typology.

The findings of this study suggested that there were differences among faculty relative to their perceptions of the dean's exercise of legitimate power, reward power, and coercive power. That is, local and local-cosmopolitan faculty 􀀇embers attached greater importance to legitimate power, reward power, and coercive power as reasons for com­pliance than did cosmopolitan and indifferent faculty mem­bers. 􀀋he results of this study indicated that, contrary to expectations, there were no differences among the four latent social role types in their responses to expert power and referent power.

Several researchers (e.g., Katz and Kahn, 1966; Bachman, 1968; Slocum, 1970) have pointed out that referent power and expert power represent personal characteristics of the power holder. Clark (1971) has noted that college faculty members operate in a highly individualistic way. One reason that faculty members' responses relative to expert and referent power did not vary according to their latent social roles may be that local, cosmopolitan, local­cosmopolitan, and indifferent faculty members share a tendency to comply to an administrator based on their perceptions of his personal characteristics, of his individuality as it is expressed in his role behavior. The nature of a college faculty population may account for the fact that not all of the predicted relationships were found.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Educational Leadership

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy

First Committee Member (Chair)

Richard Lee Holemon

Second Committee Member

Ronald Eugene Blood

Third Committee Member

Paul Arnold Pohland

Fourth Committee Member

James Clark Moore

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