Gandhi, Mandela, Mother Teresa, a Tree, a Pillow … Images of Leadership from Future Leaders

How do undergraduate business students at Wharton depict and describe the essence of leadership? Since 2000, all Wharton freshmen have been required to answer that question through Images of Leadership, a project sponsored by Wharton’s undergraduate leadership program, led by director Anne M. Greenhalgh and associate director Christopher I. Maxwell.

From fall 2000 through fall 2003, Greenhalgh and Maxwell asked 1,918 freshmen enrolled in Management 100: Leadership and Communication in Groups to select or design an image that represented leadership, and then write a 100-word essay explaining why they selected that image. Each student’s response was posted to a secure website.

In an effort to understand students’ perceptions of leadership before they began instruction, the two directors then conducted a detailed, automated search of the information submitted in order to identify the most frequently used images as well as the nouns, adjectives and verbs students chose to portray leaders.

In a recent report called, Images of Leadership: The Story Emerging Leaders Tell, Greenhalgh and Maxwell discuss the students’ responses. First, the students selected what Greenhalgh and Maxwell called the "sort of images we might expect" — namely, images of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, John F. Kennedy, Nelson Mandela, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Napoleon on horseback, George Washington crossing the Delaware River, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, Confucius, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and New York City firemen after 9/11, and sports figures like Michael Jordan.

Full Story: http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1417.cfm