Leadership Motivation in Accounting Students: Role of Locus of Control, Emotional Intelligence, and Sociability

Research has indicated that there is a need to understand the leadership motivation among accounting students while they prepare for the accounting profession. The concern with leadership motivation is accentuated by a clear need for future accounting leaders to help protect the financial interests of society. Before effective leadership can be achieved, however, individuals with a willingness to lead others must first be identified. To identify such individuals, leadership motivation must be better understood. As such, a more multifaceted examination of additional key personal abilities and personality traits was undertaken to contribute to the understanding of leadership motivation. This quantitative correlational study included the examination of emotional intelligence and sociability to determine whether either or both moderate the relationship between the predictor variable (internal/external locus of control) and the outcome variables motivation-to-lead styles (affective-identity, social-normative, and calculative). The locus of control theory and the motivation-to-lead model combined to provide the theoretical framework for this study. The theory of reasoned action and the theory of interpersonal behavior provided additional theoretical basis for the examination of emotional intelligence and sociability as possible moderators in this study. The study participants consisted of 160 sophomore, junior, senior, and graduate-level accounting students from a regionally accredited private university in the U.S. Midwest with results that indicated emotional intelligence moderated the relationship between internal/external locus of control and each of the three motivation-to-lead styles with the p value of the interaction term in each case < .05. More specifically, these results indicated that individuals with low locus of control scores (internality) and high scores in emotional intelligence demonstrated even higher levels of motivation-to-lead. Results indicated the second potential moderator, sociability, did not moderate this relationship. Future research may continue to build on the body of knowledge in the area of motivation-to-lead by examining other key individual differences and the correlation to the motivation-to-lead styles.