The impact of collegiate men's fraternities on leadership development: Perceptions of former chapter presidents

Promoting student leadership development has been an objective of higher learning since the inception of American colleges and universities and is also a major tenet espoused in the mission statements of national fraternities. While both of these long standing institutions have the same objective, there is limited research on the positive leadership benefits associated with undergraduate fraternity membership. The aim of this study was to evaluate the leadership impact that service as a fraternity chapter president has on one's self-perceived leadership development. More specifically, this study addressed the self-perceived leadership impact the fraternity experience has on one's career. Study participants were fraternity members who served as chapter presidents approximately ten years ago. In order to conduct this evaluation, the researcher requested that participants complete a background questionnaire to obtain basic demographics on each participant, the Leadership Acquisitions Form (LAF), a leadership assessment instrument created by the researcher in which participants assessed their perceived effectiveness in 14 areas of leadership (e.g., delegation, motivating others, decision-making) while serving as chapter president and how those leadership skills are useful in their careers, and the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI; Kouzes & Posner, 2001) to assess participants' current self-perceived leadership behaviors and strengths in their current professions. While participants' rated themselves fairly high on the LAF and indicated a strong belief that the leadership skills they developed as chapter presidents were useful in their careers, participants did not have particularly high scores on the LPI as compared to the normative sample.