Engaging leaders from students’ perspective and the impact of professors as role models

Preparing students for the labour market is an essential part of education, and academic personnel usually influence this process. Students’ experiences with leading figures, like supervisors and other professors, can affect their expectations about future leaders. For this reason, our research aims to assess students’ beliefs and expectations and make suggestions for higher education representatives who can serve as a leadership model for them. We conducted focus group interviews mostly with engineering students at a Hungarian technical university in spring 2022. Thirty students participated in our research and were assigned to the focus groups according to their work experiences. After coding interviews, we categorized their answers into three groups: leadership qualities and professional and social expectations. According to them, a leader must be competent, socially active, and have a good personality. His or her behaviour must reflect these qualities to be engaging and a good role model. Our results showed that school and university experiences are a critical starting point and reference when students formulate their expectations towards future leaders. Therefore, it is important to raise professors’ awareness about their leadership roles and develop their leadership skills to be good role models for young people. In our study, we discuss leadership requirements and suggest developmental methods, respectively, to the university’s characteristics. In addition, we recommend integrating leadership development programs into engineering education, from which both professors and students could benefit

Congruence of Leader-follower Evaluations and the Effect of Leadership Styles on Work Engagement

The shift into relationship-oriented, positive leadership theories in recent decades brought with it a deeper investigation of leader-follower interactions. Transformational and engaging leadership styles are widely assumed to be proven determinants of work engagement, although these conclusions are based mostly on followers' evaluations. Therefore, we analysed followers' and leaders' evaluations simultaneously and used congruent results to test which leadership dimensions positively impact followers' work engagement. Our results show that follower-rated passive and charismatic leadership negatively affect work engagement. In contrast, follower-rated inspirational communication and passive leadership rated by leaders positively affect above-average work engagement. From them, inspirational communication seemed to be the most influential factor. These results draw attention to the importance of leaders' communication and emphasise its role in leader-follower interactions

The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Organizational Performance

Emotional intelligence may affect organizational performance, and the aim of our research was to examine whether this statement can be proven in the case of financially successful organizations or not. Information about leaders has been derived from online surveys with Genos EI and also from interviews, and we gathered data about organizational success from the national TAX system. Leaders usually determine group and organizational effectiveness, so we analyzed data from 22 leaders working in successful Hungarian companies. According to our results, some emotional competencies correlate with performance. In this case self-awareness, awareness of others and self-management seemed to affect organizational performance. In our regression analysis, self-awareness seemed to be a predictor variable of performance. The relationship between emotional intelligence and performance should be examined further by expanding on the analysis of other performance indicators and leadership styles