Reference no: EM132276206

Question 1

The long-standing debate about the possibility of teaching leadership is yet to find conclusive answers. However, the continued use of educational interventions such as seminars, courses, and retreats demonstrates that leadership can actually be taught (Kronz, 2013). The aim of the proposed thesis will be to show that participation in international student organizations not only develops leadership skills but also helps to create international leaders who can practice on a multinational level. Furthermore, the rising trend of globalization has resulted in unique leadership challenges were the leaders have to work in unfamiliar environments and to make critical decisions using limited  information.

In addition, multinational leaders are expected to work with diverse teams using a very crucial skill of cultural sensitivity that can be learned. Multinational leaders have to learn about the geography and the general environment of the foreign countries where they practice leadership. Conley (2013) refers to this as a shift of leadership role from being the administrator to an anthropologist. It has

evolved in due course to become the art of establishing connections and condemning boundaries to connect with the global communities. Therefore, participating in student organizations helps to build connections with people/leaders from other countries on a face to face basis. This concurs with Conley's (2013) perception that the face to face interactions have a lasting impact than technology-based or online interactions.

On the other hand, multinational leaders must emphasize the importance of worker interactions. This implies that on a personal level, the leaders should first recognize the benefits of interpersonal relations in the workplace. This is closely related to team performance and the need for the leader to create a collaborative environment in the workplace (Darling and Fischer, 1998). In this case, the leader gains more insight into the issues when he/she participates in international student organizations.

The Erasmus Student Network (ESN) will be used to advance the objectives of the proposed thesis. Founded on16th October 1989, the organization grew significantly to become the largest student association in Europe which develops and promotes student exchange programs. The choice of the organization was influenced by several factors.

First of all, it offers its services to a relatively large number of youngsters (approximately 200,000 international students per year) which means that it's possible to locate a diverse team of research subjects for the thesis. In addition, the organization offers a different program known as "internationalization at home" which focuses on a group of students who cannot get a period abroad. This will be used to increase the significance of the results of this study.

Question 2

The proposed thesis will comprise of the following research questions;

A. Can leadership be learned through participation in student organizations?

The idea of acquiring leadership skills via participation in international student organizations suggests that leadership skills can be learned in the youthful years of an individual. This contradicts the thoughts of a respected scholar-Warren Bennis who said:
"more leaders have been made by accident, circumstance, sheer grit, or will than have been made by all the leadership courses put together "(Bennis, 2009). This meant that the possibility of acquiring leadership skills through a planned learning process was very low. It, therefore, implies that international student organizations could do nothing more or less to impact the skills of multinational programs through leadership exchange programs.

However, the study is supported by the findings of Richard Avey who proposed that 30% of leaders acquire their skills genetically through birth, 30% in the formative years while the remaining 30% is modeled throughout an individual's life (Avolio, Rotundo and Walumbwa, 2009). This means that the international student organizations can provide a platform for the 30% of leaders to acquire leadership skills in due course.

B. What is the role of international student organization exchange programs in giving students insight into global cultures and promoting cultural sensitivity?

This research question will focus on the impact of the exchange programs to the student leadership development model. It will analyze the learning opportunities provided by the programs and their ability to stimulate multicultural engagement among the students. In particular, it will examine how the programs help students to attain multicultural leadership skills by advancing from simple to complex leadership dimensions throughout their stay at the organization. Therefore, students will identify how working in diverse teams helped them acquire cultural sensitivity over time by identifying the difficulties they encountered and the interventions that they learned/ used to counteract them.

C. What actions should international student organizations such as ESN take to enhance the growth of multinational leaders?

The third research question will seek to uncover how the students progress towards complexity, integration, and change to become multinational leaders. In a real sense, it will monitor the development of students through the specific stages of the development model to
identify bottlenecks and suggest possible actions.

For example, the problem of the language barrier which is prevalent in international student organizations will be addressed by hiring interpreters to help students understand each other. Similarly, stereotypes should be addressed at the initial stages of the exchange programs to ensure that the diverse cultures that participate in the program fit comfortably in the platform. On the other hand, the role of the international student organizations in monitoring the practice of leadership skills by its graduates will be important.

D. In what ways are the exchange programs conducted abroad different from the approach of internationalization at home? Which gives better leadership outcomes?

Conley (2013) suggests that face to face interactions are more promising when it comes to the development of relational leadership skills rather than online or technology-based methods. The participants of the study will be quizzed on their mode of participation in ESN. The characteristics of exchange programs for students who travel abroad will be compared with those of the alternative approach- internationalization at home.

In the end, the study will determine the approach that provided better opportunities for relational leadership. This will give a conclusion about the best approach for developing multinational leaders.

Question 3

The study will be based upon three theoretical concepts (Stage based model of leadership identity development, the Cognitive development theory, and the Chickering's psychosocial theory). It will also build upon the four main individual behavioral styles namely; the analyzer, the socializer, the director and the relater (Kronz, 2014). These behavioral styles will be used to account for the different styles that individuals use to interact or communicate with others. They will also be used to determine how receiving feedback from others would enable individuals to locate themselves along the four behavioral styles. In this sense, the study will evaluate the different competencies that are required by the participants of student leadership organizations who desire to become multinational leaders.

The Stage based model of leadership identity development uses a grounded theory approach to evaluate the steps taken to attain multinational leadership skills (Komives et al., 2006). In this case, the use of a helix rather than a circular model allows the stages of development to be repeated in a circular fashion (Komives et al., 2006). The first stage in this model is awareness which involves the recognition that leadership actually exists and that successful leaders have been on the scene for a while. The second stage entails is engagement where students experience their interpersonal interaction with peers and seek new friendships.

In stage three, the leader was identified while in stage 4, leadership was differentiated (Komives et al., 2006).

On the other hand, the Cognitive development theory focuses on the thought processes involved in leadership identity development. It emphasizes on reflexive thinking in social multinational contexts which promotes the development of multinational leaders (Komives et al., 2006). Chickering's Psychosocial theory suggests that establishing leadership identity involves a progression through certain vectors that move from autonomy towards interdependence than the development of sustainable interpersonal relationships.

Based on this model, relationships, purpose, and integrity have to be developed for student leaders to make commitments in the global interactional context within which leadership is practiced (Komives et al., 2006).

Question 4

One of the main aspects of successful research is the issue of selecting the right research methodology. The research method is basically the procedure to follow in order to implement our study. In order to systematically conduct our research, we would like to suggest a suitable research design and methodological approach based on the "research onion", the work of Saunders, Lewis, and Thornhill in 2008.

To begin with, according to the first layer of the research onion, we choose the research philosophy for our study, which is meant to provide a particular view on the matter we are interested in. By choosing the right research philosophy, we would be able to reflect certain assumptions about how we perceive and understand the world. The choice of research philosophy has also a crucial effect on the strategy and design of our study.

Thus, we believe that the most suitable philosophy of our study among four research philosophies (positivism, realism, interpretivism, and pragmatism) described by Saunders et al. (2007), is interpretivism. According to the authors, interpretivism is about understanding the way humans interpret their social roles according to the meaning they give to those roles. In this way, we, as researchers, would interpret the social roles of our research participants based on our own set of meanings (Saunders et al., 2007).

The purpose of our research is to understand how taking a leadership role in a student organization may affect the leadership development of students. We believe there is no one true answer to this matter to be identified if we adopted the positivist philosophy. Instead, we assume that the development of leadership skills of a particular individual as a result of participation in a student organization is highly dependent on the frame of reference and perspective of that individual.

From the ontological point of view, we adopt subjectivism, which follows from the interpretivism philosophy. According to subjectivism, we argue it is necessary to study the subjective meanings that motivate students for their actions associated with taking a leadership role in order for us to understand those actions. This leads us to the choice of a particular research approach, the second layer of the research onion. We plan to perform an inductive study, which in contrast to deductive, it is aimed to build a theory based on the data collected. Since the results of our study are to be developed within a certain context of Erasmus Student Network organization, we believe that inductive reasoning is more likely to be relevant.

We plan to begin our study by collecting relevant data associated with the leadership skills, student organizations and the process of leadership development. As soon as a reasonable amount of data is collected, we intend to search for particular patterns of data that can be observed and then develop a theory that may explain those patterns. When it comes to research strategies, we choose the classic grounded theory strategy, which was developed by sociologists Glaser and Strauss in 1967. Goulding's study in 2002 (cited in Saunders et al. 2007) suggests that grounded theory is a particularly useful strategy for the research aimed to explain the behavior of the subjects studied.

After having identified an inductive approach and grounded theory strategy for our study, we believe the most suitable method for data collection is qualitative, non-statistical analysis method. According to Creswell (2003), the qualitative method usually associates with conducting the interviews to obtain respondents' opinions, views, and attitudes. Since we are interested in students' perceptions about their leadership experience within a student organization, we, therefore, plan to use qualitative techniques through interviewing as a primary data collection and analysis method. Thus, based on the research onion model, we identify our research to be carried out using a mono-method, a single qualitative data collection technique as conducting semi-structured interviews. To conclude, our research will be a cross-sectional study due to time constraints of the academic course.

Question 5

Data collection is meant to be the process of gathering information from relevant sources in order to answer the research question of our study. Nowadays, there are multiple tools for collecting the data with the potential to contact individuals in any part of the world electronically. Our study is based on various Erasmus Student Network sections around Sweden and we aim to have a conversation with the board members of those ESN sections, who took a leadership role in their local organization. The empirical data we plan to collect will be conducted through one-on-one semi-structured interviews with a relatively small sample size of 8-15 respondents.

We believe that the use of interviewing techniques would add value to the relevance, reliability, and validity of the answers collected. As it was described by King in 2004 (cited in Saunders et al. 2008), semi-structured interviews are often referred to as "qualitative research interviews". We choose this particular category of interviews in order to provide ourselves flexibility of omitting some or asking additional questions if needed to clarify statements by respondents depending on the flow of the interview. We will be collecting the data through the use of an audio recording device (provided that the permission of respondents is acquired) in order to ensure the accuracy of the data collected.

One-on-one interviews will be conducted face-to-face whenever possible, however, due to the physical distance constraints between us and the potential respondents, telephone interviews and internet-mediated video-calls will be used as well. Initially, we plan to send the introductory letter to the potential respondents with the invitation to participate in our research study and the consent form for taking part in the research.

Afterward, given we receive positive responses from potential respondents, we plan to schedule the interviews by confirming the method of communicating (face-to-face, phone, video call) and suitable dates/times for the participants. assume one interview to last from 30 to 40 minutes.

The questions we are going to prepare for the interviews will involve certain topics associated with the leadership experiences of the board members. As such, we plan to ask questions regarding the participants' understanding of their roles within the organization in order to explore their own identity view. Also, we are interested in particular events or activities they experienced that respondents feel have contributed to their leadership skills.

Additionally, we aim to identify if any of those opportunities provided by student organization have challenged them or had no significant impact on their leadership capabilities, what are the benefits and drawbacks of taking a leadership role within a particular student organization. We are also interested in collecting the answers from former ESN leaders who were involved in student organization activities years ago and may provide insight into whether student organization positively contributed to their leadership development in practice.

Question 6

In many cases, the success of the study is highly dependent on the access to the potential participant of the research. Since our study is mainly focused on collecting the primary data, gaining access to board members of ESN student organization is a crucial matter. The basic type of access is physical access, that needs to be approved by the management of the organization.

We plan to contact the President of ESN Sweden and notify him on our interest in conducting the research which would involve the board members of the local sections around Sweden. We believe that his support, as well as the support of ESN Sweden National Board, would add value to the local sections' interest in participation. We could also request access to the ESN organization's internal documents to be used as a valuable secondary source for our study. We believe in the importance of acquiring cognitive access to the participants, in a way that they will be open to provide their opinions and describe their experiences of taking part in ESN.

We assume that our own experience of being a part of Erasmus Student Network at the local section in Kalmar may establish our credibility and facilitate building an open communication channel between us and the respondents. Additionally, our knowledge of the organization from within and the existence of established contact with some of the potential respondents may add value to the successful outcomes of our interviews.

Since the Erasmus Student Network is a non-governmental and non-profitable organization local sections provide the information on their activities openly on their websites and social network accounts. Therefore, we do not expect issues on confidentiality of our research findings. On the other hand, the anonymity of our respondents' identity will be provided if requested by the research participants.

Furthermore, there are ethical concerns that need to be addressed. According to Saunders et al. (2008), research ethics involves «...questions about how we formulate and clarify our research topic, design our research and gain access, collect data, process and store our data, analyse data and write up our research findings in a moral and responsible way» (p. 184).

In order to avoid any ethical misconduct, we plan to read the university's Code of ethics or some other ethical guidelines to get familiarised with the terms and procedures associated with ethical study research. One of the examples could be The European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity developed by the European Commission in 2017.

First of all, we are going to explain the purpose and objectives of our study to the participants prior to starting the interviewing process. As it was mentioned above, the consent form will be sent to the participants in order to familiarise them with the interviewing procedure. Also, the privacy and anonymity of the participants will be provided if requested by them.

The participation in our research will be totally voluntarily with the right of the participants to withdraw from the process at any time. As such, avoidance of any stress and harm to the research participants, their safety and comfort while taking part in our research process will be guaranteed.

We also strive for honesty and transparency regarding the whole process of our research from data collection to the results derived from that data. We will not falsify, fabricate or misrepresent any data collected. We will not discriminate or be biased to the participants of our study on the basis of their race, nationality, gender and other characteristics. We will strive for social responsibility by preventing any social harm of the research to the participants, colleagues, and the public in general.
References

Avolio, B., Rotundo, M. and Walumbwa, F. (2009). RETRACTED: Early life experiences as determinants of leadership role occupancy: The importance of parental influence and rule breaking behavior. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(3), pp.329-342.

Bennis, W. (2009). On becoming a leader (revised edition). New York: Basic Books.

Conley, K. (2013). Looking for leadership.(ISSUE ORIENTED)(developing leadership skills) ,. Learning & Leading with Technology, 41(2), p.4.

Darling, J. and Fischer, A. (1998). Developing the management leadership team in a multinational enterprise. European Business Review, 98(2), pp.100-108.

Komives, S., Longerbeam, S., Owen, J., Mainella, F. and Osteen, L. (2006). A Leadership Identity Development Model: Applications from a Grounded Theory. Journal of College Student Development, 47(4), pp.401-418.

Kronz, E. (2014). Acquiring and developing leaders on a global or multinational scale. Strategic HR Review, 13(6), pp.249-254.

Creswell, J.W., 2002. Educational research: Planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative (pp. 146-166). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Glaser, B.G. and Strauss, A.L., 1967. The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldire.

Saunders, M., Lewis, P.H.I.L.I.P. and Thornhill, A.D.R.I.A.N., 2007. Research methods. Business Students 4th edition Pearson Education Limited, England.