Rural collaborative leadership training and the potential influence of community social capital on its application

Two problems exist in rural environments that are of interest to this study. One problem is that citizens in rural communities are uncertain if short-term leadership training programs provide the collaborative attitudes necessary for successful leadership after program completion. A second problem is that rural citizens are uncertain as to whether the social capital levels of their community influence the collaborative attitudes of their leaders as well. The first purpose of this quantitative, nonexperimental, correlational research study was to discover whether a statistically significant relationship existed between the completion of one short-term leadership-training program and collaborative leadership attitudes of its graduates when compared to a randomly selected group of untrained citizens in the same locations. The second purpose was to discover if a statistically significant relationship existed between social capital levels in each study community and the collaborative attitudes of trained graduates from the same short-term training program. A lack of sufficient numbers of participants resulted in no valid statistical determinations being made. This study recommends that replication take place so that a sufficient amount of participation might yield valid statistically significant results. If the non-statistically valid results seen in this study were replicated in additional studies then rural citizens and short-term training programs could use these discoveries to evaluate and improve upon their efforts.