Building the Leaders of the Future: A Communication Perspective on College Student Leadership Programs

While leadership communication has been the focus of interest for communication scholars in the last 20 years, no work has been done to understand the conceptualizations of leadership and its implications for the communication discipline in the higher education setting. With an interpretive lens and drawing upon post-positivist and social constructionist approaches to leadership, this study uses constant comparative analysis of interviews with instructors of college student leadership programs and documents to promote new insights into the ways in which communication theory can contribute to the interdisciplinary study of leadership training and development. Key findings of this work include the view of leadership as having voice, achieving common goals or creating positive transformation. This study also found that both the motives for the existence of leadership programs and its target populations influence not only the understandings of leadership, but also communication, which is viewed as not important, as simply public speaking or a set of soft skills.