A Short Course in Leadership Skills for the Rehabilitation Team

Rehabilitation programs rely on interdisciplinary teams of professionals and paraprofessionals to provide effective services. Teams that work well together provide better quality services to their clientele (Corrigan & Giffort, 1998; Corrigan & McCracken, 1997, 1999). Also, members are able to form a more cohesive team when they are led by a competent leader (Dyer, 1995). Skills that help leaders manage their teams will ultimately improve the quality of rehabilitation programs. Experts in management and organizational psychology have developed several paradigms for effective leadership that are relevant to the rehabilitation team. Bass (1990, 1997) identified two sets of especially important skills related to transformational and transactional leadership. Transformational leaders help team members view their work from more elevated perspectives and develop innovative ways to deal with work-related problems. Skills for transformational leadership include inspiration, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, participative decision making, and elective delegation. Rehabilitation teams must not only develop creative and innovative programs, they must maintain them over time as a series of leader-team member transactions. Transactional leadership skills include goal-setting, feedback, and reinforcement strategies. These positive skills are contrasted to relatively ineffective approaches like laissez faire leadership where managers remain aloof and uninvolved with their staff. Recent factor analytic research suggests that Bass' paradigm is applicable to the operation of rehabilitation programs (Corrigan, Garman, Lam, & Leary, 1998; Corrigan, Garman, Canar, & Lam, in press). Hence, this paradigm was used to develop a leadership training program for rehabilitation teams (Corrigan & Garman, in press; Corrigan, Garman, & Lickey, 1998(1)). The original curriculum, summarized in Table 1, required 90 minutes per week for twelve weeks to complete. Learning activities included didactic lecture, role plays, and problem solving about barriers to leadership skills. The original program also included leadership skills for the culturally diverse team. Table 1. Curriculum in the "Leadership Training for the Rehabilitation Team" Program. OVERALL GOALS OF THE LEADERSHIP TRAINING COURSE (*) TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP (*) - Inspiration and charisma (*) - Intellectual stimulation (*) - Individual consideration (*) - Relevant skills (*) Mission statements (*) Problem statements (*) Evaluation projects (*) Participative decision making (*) Elective delegation (*) TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP (*) - Overall principles (*) - Relevant skills (*) Goal setting (*) Self management (*) Tracking behaviors DIVERSITY - Overall principles - Conflict resolution Note. Starred items (*) were also included in the leadership short course. Unfortunately, results of a process analysis of the twelve-week program found general dissatisfaction with the time demands of the curriculum leading to the conclusion that twelve weeks was excessive. Hence, a short form of the course was developed that could be delivered in an eight-hour day. The shortened curriculum included sections on transformational and transactional leadership and exercises were sharply curtailed to meet the eight-hour time demand. The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of completing the short course on participants. Method Twenty-seven leaders of rehabilitation teams were solicited to participate in the daylong leadership skills training program and corresponding program evaluation. Participants were team leaders rather than agency administrators. They included managers of local Department of Vocational Rehabilitation offices, coordinators of case management teams, and leaders of supported employment groups. …