Leadership skills of directors of agricultural divisions and departments and their role in supporting sustainable rural development in Nineveh Governorate

• Hafsa Fatah Hade

  Author

The research aimed to determine the level of leadership skills among the directors of agricultural divisions and departments in Nineveh Governorate, and to identify the role of these skills in supporting sustainable rural development, as well as to determine the ranking of the areas of leadership skills according to their levels, and to arrange the items of each area according to their importance, and to reveal the nature of the relationship between the level of leadership skills and some personal and functional variables of the respondents, represented by age, sex, academic qualification, years of job service, along with training courses. To achieve the research objectives, a questionnaire has been used to collect data. It consisted of two parts: the first part measured the personal and functional variables of the respondents, while the second part comprised 75 items to assess their leadership skills, distributed across five domains with 15 items per domain: interpersonal skills, self-personal skills, managerial skills, intellectual skills, and technical skills. After verifying the apparent and content validity of the instrument, its reliability coefficient was calculated using Cronbach's alpha, yielding a value of 0.96, which reflects a high level of internal consistency. The research population consisted of employees of the Nineveh Agriculture Directorate and its affiliated agricultural departments, totaling (430) employees (males/females). A simple random sample of (132) employees (males/females), representing (32%) of the research population, was selected. The data were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), employing certain statistical tests appropriate to achieving the research objectives. The results showed that the overall level of leadership skills among directors of agricultural divisions and departments in Nineveh Governorate was average, tending towards low, while managerial skills ranked first among the leadership skill areas. The outcomes also demonstrated significant correlations between the level of leadership skills and age, years of service, and training courses, while no significant correlation was observed between the level of leadership skills and either sex or educational qualification. The research's outcomes indicate the importance of leadership skills in enhancing the ability of agricultural management to perform its developmental functions, particularly in serving the rural community and supporting its needs. This makes developing leadership capabilities among managers of agricultural divisions and departments one of the important approaches to supporting sustainable rural development. In this context, we recommend that higher agricultural and extension administrations should adopt continuous and specialized training programs targeting those directors to include various areas of leadership skills, with a focus on aspects that demand more development to contribute in raising competence of administrative and leadership performance, and enhancing the ability of agricultural institutions to contribute to supporting sustainable rural development in Nineveh Governorate.

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