LEADERSHIP AND ITS IMPACT ON EMPLOYEE PERFORMANCE

Introduction

The student leader is valuable assets of a university or college in order to maintain the

stability of the high learning institution by making significant contributions to the other

students for example taking care of welfare, check and balance to management and also

providing good programs for intellectual enhancement of the students. Certainly, there are

people who can be considered natural leaders because of their inherent characteristics.

Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and George Washington are examples. However, research

in several fields—including emotional intelligence, social-emotional learning, and positive

psychology shows that anyone, even young children, can learn and develop leadership

qualities. People can choose to be leaders, starting with self-leadership(Istania et al., 2019).

How people lead their lives, their choices, the contributions they make, and the development

of their character are at the heart of self-leadership. The same applies to the definition of

student leaders and how they are created. In university, most of the student leadership are

groomed through student’s council (Christopoulos, 2016). A student council is a group of

student leaders who work with an adult advisor to collaborate with others to impact their

school community, which impacts their city or town, which impacts our state, which impacts

our country, which changes the world(Huang, 2018).

Nowadays, the presence of student leadership organisation cannot be neglected. The

purpose of the student leadership organization is to give students an opportunity to develop

leadership by organizing and carrying out school activities and service projects. Ideas are

presented, voted upon and confirmed by the student body president. Any student that is

interested in leadership, organizational behaviour, event planning or becoming more involved

in the university are welcome to become involved.

 Social media is a set of internet-based applications (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) that

is changing the way people communicate. Social media is primarily referred as an online

medium that provides opportunity for social interaction to occur such as Facebook, Twitter,

YouTube and blog (O'Keeffe & ClarkePearson, 2011). Social media is changing what people

communicate. There is no doubt on the usefulness of social media (Dinerman, 2011), but it is

also important to take caution on the risks associated with the medium. The risks can be

overcome if youth have adequate level of social media competencies.

Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing application, is quickly growing in political

importance. At 400 million active users, Instagram is the second largest social media site,
ahead of Twitter and behind Facebook (Alhabash & Ma, 2017). During the 2016 US
presidential election, all major party candidates during the primaries and general election
actively used Instagram to further their message (Duffy, 2016; Sander, 2015). Instagram
messages, called posts, can include photos, short-form video, and text that provide political
news. Distinctive filters can be used to change the color balance or contrast on photos to
express different feelings. The posts can request Instagram users to take actions, such as
voting for candidates (Askeroğlu, 2017). To interact with leaders, users can “tag” a political
leader in a post, which can be seen by the leader and the users’ followers, or send a direct
message, which is seen only by the leader. Users also can “like” a leader’s post, which
increases the popularity of a leader’s message(Pilgrim and Bohnet-joschko, 2019).

Visual communication research suggests that creative images have the potential to
influence public opinion because images can have greater success at grabbing viewers’
attention, conveying emotions, and changing political behaviour (Brader, 2005; Graber,
1996). There are lot of research has been conducted regarding the usage of Instagram in
societies. However, most of them focus on negative impact of Instagram for example, a study
from (Casaló et al., 2018) found that many people suffer from “Instagram envy”, with those
who abstained from using the popular site reporting that they felt more satisfied with their
lives. All of negative impacts can be changed into positive impact through the role of
leadership especially for generation Y that are majority usage of Instagram (AlShuaibi,
2015). This research will be conducted to develop a model of Instagram usage in order to
enhance student’s leadership.
Problem statement

Instagram give big impacts on students especially in Malaysia as it beats the number of

users of Twitter (Hamid, 2014). Students nowadays are very active in social media as in leads

to their personality traits which has bad and good effects on them. That is why the

university’s stakeholder needs to trace their students on social media by doing observation

and take this thing seriously as it will affect their future because they are all future

leaders(Khalid, Jayasainan and Hassim, 2018). From the observation, many of female

students having trouble in doing outdoor exercise because of they are not confident with

themselves and also because of cultural especially Muslim students. However, some research

found that Instagram received many negative marks, especially for sleep quality, bullying,

body image and FOMO that are associated with increases in depression and anxiety(Viktil,

2011).

Basically, Instagram’s influence is the effect of Instagram towards society in terms of

whether it gives a good or bad influence on society. As we know, the main use of Instagram

is actually only for sharing photos with the followers but society has turned it into something

new and different. As for example, some of them use Instagram as a platform to market their

product as they observe that people are more attract to it. Other than that, Instagram also has

influenced their user to enhance their photography skill to become better. On the other hand,

there is also bad influence of Instagram especially among students and those people who has

low self-esteem. The previous research focus a lot of impact of Instagram towards

community however none of the research cover on enhancement of student leadership.

Hence, the question is, is that Instagram will be give significance effect on student’s

leadership? The aim of this study is to develop a instagram’s usage model to enhance student

leadership. In order to achieve this objective, this research proposed a framework how to

enhance student’s leadership through Instagram.

Research Questions

In this study, the following research questions in has been formulated as below:

I. What are the impacts of Instagram to the student’s leadership?

II. How to design an Instagram’s usage model to enhance the student leadership?

III. How to evaluate the proposed model in improving student leadership through

Instagram’s impact.

Research Objectives

The main objective of this study is to propose a new leadership impact model that influencing

employee’s performance. Basically, the research aimed to achieve the following objectives:

I. To identify the impacts of Instagram to the student’s leadership.

II. To design an Instagram’s usage model to enhance the student leadership.

III. To validate the proposed model in improving student leadership through

Instagram’s impact.

Scope and Limitation of Study

The primary focus of this research is to explore the effect of Instagram to the student’s

leadership, in order to understand how the Instagram usage will improve the management of

student leader. In other words, the research has the scope to explore how the strategy to

Instagram usage empowerment that it gives better result on the better leadership for student in

higher learning education institution.

Significant of Study

We believe that this research will provide positive results which will have significant

contributions for university management to model student leader council through Instagram-
leadership model. With this new model, it is believed that the student’s leader organization

management can improve their leadership skills and strategy to increase productivity of the

organization.

Literature Review

1) Student’s Leadership

Student’s Leadership is the ability of a student or a group of students to influence and

guide other students as follower. An effective student’s leader possess the following

characteristics: self-confidence, strong communication and management skills, creative and

innovative thinking, perseverance in the face of failure, willingness to take risks, openness to

change, and levelheadedness and reactiveness in times of crisis. Nowadays, the presence of

student leadership organisation cannot be neglected (Suharto et al., 2018). The purpose of

the student leadership organization is to give students an opportunity to develop leadership by

organizing and carrying out school activities and service projects. The function of the student

council is based upon parliamentary procedures. Ideas are presented, voted upon and

confirmed by the student body president. Any student that is interested in leadership,

organizational behaviour, event planning or becoming more involved in the university are

welcome to become involved.

2) Factors of effective student leadership enhancement through Instagram

a. Transperancy
Presenting information about the activities of persons or companies. In other words;
more transparency means people have insight into the information being passed (Belanche,
Flavián and Ibáñez-sánchez, 2019). Instagram causes leaders to be more open. This does not
mean sharing trade secrets, it means sharing information that can be shared. In order to
succeed in this, the student learder organisation culture needs to be an open one. Lastly, for
students, leaders can use the openness though instagram in order to empower the followers.
2. Uniqueness
Student leader that potray originality and uniquness on instagram has a positive to be
followed by other students. The quality of contributions has been regarded as being important
in constructing a reputation in a univeristy community which, in turn, may lead the user to be
considered as an opinion leader(Trevisan et al., 2018) .Sharing high quality posts
(photography, writing, consistent use of logos are means by which a professional and
successful fashion blog can be created (Mendola, 2014).. In sum, Instagram online
influencers state that the quality of the content they share with their followers is crucial in
increasing the success of an account (#Hashoff, 2017a). Bearing all these in mind, it is
proposed that the quality of the content published on Instagram will influence the perception
of opinion leadership:

3. Social attractiveness
Instagram can show the side of social attrativeness of the student leader. Especially for the
leader that expert as speaker. Attractive speakers can change the attitudes of the audience
(Sharma, 1990). Regarding the same arguments used in a message, the attractive speaker is
more likely to influence the audience than less appealing ones (Chaiken, 1979). Perceived
social attractiveness can be a strong per ipheral cue for decision making. Attractive speaker
leaders through instagram can influence the audience through the identification process
(Parmelee and Roman, 2019). An audience member would feel similar or would like to be
similar to the speaker and to create a positive relationship with him/her.

4. Credibility
Credibility could be defined as the degree of the trustworthiness and reliability of the source
(Rogers and Bhowmik, 1970). In this case, it focus on the credibility of the student leader.
Credibility through instagram is related to the perception of the quality of the communication
by the audience member (Christopoulos, 2016). Credibility influences the audience through
the internalization process: members share similar values and attitudes with the speaker.
Expertise knowledge and experience the student’s leader has in the given Instagram domain
is one of the main factors of cred- ibility, along with trustworthiness, and goodwill. The other
students as follower will trust the leader that has credibility attitude on it.
5. Student-friendly
Instagram give big impacts on students especially in Malaysia as it beats the number of users
of Twitter (Hamid, 2014). Students nowadays are very active in social media as in leads to
their personality traits which has bad and good effects on them. That is why the university’s
stakeholder needs to trace their students on social media by doing observation and take this
thing seriously as it will affect their future because they are all future leaders. Other than that,
Instagram also can be use as a place to motivates students as it has a lot of information or
motivational account that improve themselves. Hence, student leader shoul take it as
advantage to win the hearts of the students.

2.6 Photography

According to (Billington and Billington, 2012), Instagram is one of the apps that combined

the passionate of photography with social media and it give big influences towards the social

medias’ user as it grows over 400 million users at this time. It influences all of the “photo

freak” who very passionate in capturing moment and share with others about it. Students are

easier to be influenced by perception through picture. Some of the leaders called it “politic

picture” because a picture can tell thousands of stories.

3) Impacts of Instagram features to the student leadership

There are a variety of factors, personal, company-based and external in instagram that can

affect student’s leadership.. Identifying these factors can help improve recruitment, retention

and organizational results. There are several impacts of Instagram for enhance good

performance for a student’s leadership organization. Numbers of study have discussed the

issue involve of implementation of Instagram toward students whether it is indirectly or

directly. The identification of the issues of the students in the university through student’s

leadership skills is important as we want to know which issue is significance to be

implemented in term of Instagram usage.

There are also some of impact Instagram towards student’s leadership which are

i) Self-Marketing

ii) Enhance Communicators and persuasion

iii) Showing charismatic of leadership

iv) Gaining information on student issues

v) Fulfil the expression from the students

Methodology

Start

Literature study on factors and impacts of

Instagram on students’ leadership

Objective 1
Data collection from

Questionnaire / survey

Develop an Instagram’s usage model to

Objective 2
enhance the student leadership

Validate Instagram’s usage model to

enhance the student leadership Objective 3

Results and Discussion

Conclusion

Flowchart of Research Methodology

Literature study

Stage 1 represents literature study and the first objective of this study which is to determine

the on factors and impacts of Instagram on students’ leadership. The purpose of the literature

review is to investigate the recent development of the works related instagram usage model in

order to identify the research gap that this research intended to address.
Multiple Regressions

Multiple regressions is a flexible method of data analysis that may be appropriate

whenever a quantitative variable which is the dependent or criterion variable is to be examined in

relationship to any other factors expressed as independent or predictor variables. Relationships

may be nonlinear, independent variables may be quantitative or qualitative, and one can examine

the effects of a single variable or multiple variables with or without the effects of other variables

taken into account (Cohen, Cohen, West, & Aiken, 2013).

Pilot Test

According to Bourque and Fielder (2003), the questionnaires should be pre-tested or

pilot tested. Where pilot studies was collecting data to serve as a guide for the larger study

and rigorous standards as to sample size and representative mixture do not apply (Zikmund

2003). The main purpose of pilot studies is to check whether the ideas in each question are

clear to respondents. The pre-test should be piloted with reasonable sample of respondents

who come from the target population and a pilot study of 30 respondents is common (Cavana

et al. 2011).

In the development of the questionnaire for this study, a pilot study will be carried out

to ensure that the items in the questionnaire were stated clearly, had the same meaning to all

the respondents, and give researcher an idea to estimate duration on completing the

questionnaire. Usually, it took respondent between 5 to 10 minutes to completed the

questionnaire. If the question were indicated as ambiguous or uncomfortable, so the question

needed to rephrase.

In this pilot study, we will select approximate 50 respondents from target population

and they will be given the questionnaires to be answered. Time taken to complete the

questionnaires will be recorded.

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