Relationships between participation in recreational activities and leadership behavior: a study on the secondary school students

Abstract

Recreation is defined as the optional and voluntary activities that are carried out individually or in a team in leisure times other than obligatory ones, and that give satisfaction to the individuals, by eliminating the adverse effects of the industrial society. As is seen, recreation becomes a dynamic lifestyle and culture element which remains widespread in the modern society. Emphasizing the concept of recreation and its important role on personal development in general on leadership attitudes in particular, it is aimed to reveal the effects of the participation of the secondary students in the recreational activities on the leadership attitudes. To reach this end, a survey is conducted on 289 secondary school's students in Istanbul, Bursa and Izmir. Data is submitted to factor, frequencies, reliability and ANOVA analyses through SPSS 13.0 demo version. The findings reveal that students who are engaging in sports activities have higher scores on transformational leadership traits while students who are not engaging such activities mainly exhibit transactional leadership behaviors. Moreover, the findings reveal that the scores for both transformational and transactional leadership behaviors of students who are engaging sports activities are higher than the scores of students who are not carrying out these activities. The results underline the fact that participation in sports activities as recreational activities plays an important role on the development of leadership attitudes for secondary school students.