Dean Leadership Traits and Faculty Job Satisfaction

Literature suggests that increasing faculty job satisfaction may help the organization improve performance. The academic college dean’s leadership style correlates with faculty job satisfaction. This study purpose was to examine the relationship between perceived dean leadership behaviors and faculty job satisfaction. One hundred twenty-two faculty members from two public colleges evaluated their immediate academic deans’ transactional and transformational leadership behaviors and gave a self-rating of overall job satisfaction. The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X) was used to measure the leadership attributes while overall job satisfaction was measured using a multidimensional job satisfaction scale to establish quantifiable variables for statistical analysis. A multiple regression analysis supplemented the bivariate correlation analyses and showed that combined leadership attributes had a strong relationship with job satisfaction. This study may encourage the use of all transformational leadership traits and the transactional leadership trait, contingent rewards, to improve job satisfaction.