Tammy Campbell
Arizona public colleges face many challenges including increasing competition from online programs, changing demographics with an influx of Hispanic people, decreasing student retention rates, decreases in funding, and increasing demands for higher education. The problem is a low level of job satisfaction of Hispanic faculty in multicultural colleges as shown in recent studies. Literature suggests that increasing faculty job satisfaction may help the organization improve performance. The academic college dean’s leadership style correlates with faculty job satisfaction. This study examined the relationship between deans’ transactional and transformational leadership qualities and overall job satisfaction of the faculty who serve under them. The purpose was to examine the relationship between perceived dean leadership behaviors and faculty job satisfaction. Correlation and hierarchical multiple regression analyses were used to examine the relationship between eight academic leadership attributes and faculty overall job satisfaction. One hundred twenty-two faculty members from two public colleges in Arizona evaluated their immediate academic deans’ transactional and transformational leadership behaviors and gave a self-rating of overall job satisfaction. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X) was used to measure the leadership attributes while overall job satisfaction was measured using a multidimensional job satisfaction scale to establish quantifiable variables for statistical analysis. Seven of the eight leadership attributes had a statistically significant relationship with job satisfaction except for active management by exception. In addition, effect sizes were medium to large. A multiple regression analysis supplemented the bivariate correlation analyses and showed that combined leadership attributes had a strong relationship with job satisfaction with the overall effect size being large in magnitude. This study may encourage the use of all transformational leadership traits and the transactional leadership trait, contingent rewards, to improve job satisfaction. Leaders may avoid the transactional leadership traits, passive management by exception and active management by exception, due to their negative relationship with job satisfaction. Additional research, perhaps a qualitative study, could investigate the cause of each relationship found in this study. Researchers could survey other industries and geographical areas, such as a manufacturing industry or higher education in the northeast, to provide a comparison.