Your new experience awaits. Try the new design now and help us make it even better

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ.

Sec. Leadership in Education

Measuring Leadership Language: Faculty Leadership LIWC Dictionary Validation Study

Provisionally accepted
Tracey E RizzutoTracey E Rizzuto1*Ague Mae ManongsonAgue Mae Manongson1Ally St. AubinAlly St. Aubin2Shinhee JeongShinhee Jeong3Christianne SpitzmeullerChristianne Spitzmeuller4Juan M MaderaJuan M Madera2
  • 1Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, United States
  • 2University of Houston, Houston, Texas, United States
  • 3University of Texas at Tyler, Tyler, Texas, United States
  • 4University of California, Merced, Merced, California, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Select one of your emails

You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:

Notify me on publication

Please enter your email address:

If you already have an account, please login

You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here

ABSTRACT This two-part multimethod study develops and validates a Faculty Leadership Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (FL-LIWC) dictionary for use in university settings. In Study 1, an integrative literature review centered on Yukl's (2012) hierarchical taxonomy of leadership behavior and Delphi panels are used to establish a four-component definition of Faculty Leadership and to generate a 354-word LIWC dictionary reflecting leadership behaviors performed by university faculty. Study 2, exploratory, confirmatory, and structural path models using textual data extracted from external review letters (ERLs) from 981 promotion and tenure cases across five universities is employed to conduct a multi-step validation analysis of the dictionary's accuracy, nomological network and potential for gender difference. This study demonstrates that FL-LIWC is a theoretically coherent and empirically robust tool for measuring faculty leadership and is relatively free of potential biases associated with gender difference. It provides greater understanding of how linguistic reflections in ERL text may be used in university setting to provide additional insight into leadership behaviors that are of emerging importance to faculty performance assessment and academic advancement decisions..

Keywords: ERL, Tenure & Promotion, Mixed methodologies, Faculty leadership, LIWC

Received: 19 Sep 2025; Accepted: 24 Nov 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Rizzuto, Manongson, St. Aubin, Jeong, Spitzmeuller and Madera. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Tracey E Rizzuto, trizzut@lsu.edu

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary Material