Adolescent’s Perception of Father’s Leadership Style in the Family

Abstract

A father’s leadership style plays an important role in educating their young and building a happy family. Generally, there are three types of leadership styles for a family, authoritative (democratic), authoritarian (control) and laissez faire (permissive). Nevertheless there are some fathers who fail to properly lead their families and do not have the capacity to be exemplary towards their young due to their nature being coarse, ill-tempered, inconsiderate, irresponsible, unconcered or indifferent, autocratic, dislike for discussion with their young and so on. Therefore, this research is conducted to study adolescents’ perception of their father’s leadership style. It is designed as a survey study with questionnaire as the main research instrument. Research respondents total 454 form four students randomly selected from five schools in Hulu Langat district of Selangor. Data obtained from questionnaires are descriptively analyzed using SPSS version 22. Research results find that item ‘my father gives me freedom to choose my own friends so long as they invite me to goodness’ scored the highest mean value ( mean=3.53), followed by item ‘my father gives me the freedom to choose my own ambition and career with his guidance‘ (mean=3.51). These findings show that authoritative leadership is more used by fathers in this research. The implications of this research may assist fathers to strengthen their leadership style in bringing up their adolescents to build their potential for excellence.