College Student Leadership Development: Transformational Leadership as a Theoretical Foundation

The fast-paced growth of organizations in the world requires more leaders who are equipped with the requisite skills and competencies to bring about positive change in society. Essentially, contemporary society demands a set of leaders who are able to provide adaptive and creative solutions for the challenges that confront the modern world. The development of leadership competencies has therefore become critical at virtually every level of society. Accordingly, various organizations and institutions have employed various approaches to develop the requisite skills and competencies in their leaders. However, given the subtlety and range of skills demanded for leadership in contemporary society, leadership educators are challenged to select and synthesize appropriate concepts and methods consistent with the features of the new millennium that can buttress and give significance to student leadership experience. Otherwise, leadership development could be premised on theoretical approaches to leadership that may have been effective for past centuries “premised on physical production” (Uhl-Bien, Marion & McKelvy, 2007, Rost, 1993). The purpose of this paper, then, is to explore the impact of leadership education on college students and to propose transformational leadership as a theoretical foundation on which to build a formal student leadership development program that can adequately prepare college students for leadership for positive change.