Effect of Student Leadership on Academic Performance and Perceived Employability: A Longitudinal Study on Scale Development and Validation in the Indian Context

Development of student leadership is highly desired due to the trend of offering managerial roles to out-going graduates. Although, measurement of student leadership has gained scholarly attention in the last decade, the cross-cultural aspects associated with the extant scale cannot be ruled out. Given the rapid curriculum reforms and pedagogical innovations that have taken place recently in the Indian higher education system and the repeated concerned raised over low employability levels among Indian youth, the present study aims to measure the effect of student leadership dimensions on students’ academic performance and perceived employability. To achieve this objective, a scale development exercise was carried out by collecting data from 153 students enrolled in leadership course. A longitudinal approach with a gap of two months was followed to obtain six self- reported and four observed dimensions of student leadership at time 1 and time 2 respectively. Focus group interviews were conducted for item generation followed by factor analysis to explore student leadership dimensions. Finally, multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the study hypotheses. The results revealed that student leadership dimensions were positively related to academic performance and perceived employability of higher education students in India. This study, apparently, is one of the first in the Asian context to explore the student leadership dimensions and measure its effect on students’ objective and subjective outcomes i.e. GPA scores and perceived employability respectively.