Leadership Competencies and Styles in NGO: An Empirical Analysis

Abstract

This article presents the results of a comprehensive empirical study of leadership competencies and styles among 50 employees and volunteers of the NGO “Rokada”, which carries out humanitarian activities under martial law in Ukraine. The study combined an assessment of baseline leadership potential with an evaluation of the effectiveness of the author's leadership development training programme. We used some validated psychodiagnostic tools: the Zharikov and Krushelnitsky method for diagnosing leadership abilities, Bass’s Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ-5X), and the Beales–Schneider method for studying leadership style. The statistical analysis included descriptive statistics with an assessment of the distribution shape, Student’s t-test for independent samples with calculation of Cohen’s effect size, Pearson’s correlation analysis, and factor analysis (principal component method with Varimax rotation).
The results revealed a clearly defined hierarchy of leadership profiles that reflects the functional specificity of humanitarian work, namely, strategic transformational leadership dominates at the top level, operational transactional effectiveness at the middle level, and high relationship orientation combined with vulnerability to stress at specialists/volunteers. Factor analysis allowed us to identify three key dimensions of leadership that explain 70% of the variance and have direct practical significance for team building in crisis conditions. The assessment of the training according to the Kirkpatrick model (levels of “learning” and “behavior”) demonstrated a statistically and practically significant improvement in indicators (an increase from 26.2% to 41.4%), especially in the components of transformational leadership and communicative-empathic skills. The obtained data are of high practical importance for the development of differentiated leadership development systems in Ukrainian humanitarian organizations working with vulnerable groups of the population, volunteers and under conditions of chronic stress and uncertainty.