Transferability of Leadership Skills to Day-Scholars by the Leadership Programme at KDU

Abstract

Leadership programme for the military education is not a novel subject but for the other tertiary education systems it is very much highlighted and debatable not only within the intellectual community but also within theordinary society at large in Sri Lanka. However, KDU as a Defence university, has already created environment to practice leadership skills to the military cadets and integrated a leadership module to military cadets’ curriculum. In this context, this study is based on how leadership skills are transferred to day scholars who are enlisted to KDU as undergraduates to follow the same education curriculum, except for the military subjects that are integrated in leadership programmes. When considering the combination of military students’ and day scholars’ education programme, it is observed that there is a significant gap between the behaviour and attitudes of day scholars in compared to the military cadets. Therefore, in order to minimize the identified gap,a leadership programme is designed extracting from the military curriculum that can be integrated to the leadership skills programme of day scholars on military cadets. This study is basically intended to test how leadership programme is integrated with transformational leadership of Bass theory,how this theory is related to the behaviour of day scholars in leadership programme and further to findout how this same theory could be utilise to develop the attitudes and behaviours of day scholars’ education. This study was conducted using randomlyselectedsample representing all the facultiesand the result was analysed empirically.The results showed that the respond and behaviour was very much positive towards the leadership programme and further to enhance the quality of education of the participants in the set environment.