Method
Participants
The sample for this study were 259 graduate students who were enrolled in the evening
MBA program of a private university in the US Northwest and in the evening MPA
program of a large public university in the Midwest. The respondents were from a large
variety of private and public sector organizations; 132 of the respondents (51 percent)
worked for medium to large corporations and small businesses, 95 (37 percent) worked
for state government agencies, and 32 (12 percent) worked for nonprofit organizations.
The respondents had full-time jobs during the day. Almost half of them were between 25
and 30 years old, and 65 percent of them had worked for their current manager for more
than one year. The gender composition of the respondent sample was 45 percent male
and 47 percent of the supervisors rated by respondents were female. More than half of
the respondents (52 percent) held professional/technical jobs, 26 percent held first-level
management positions (team leader, supervisor, or section head), 14 percent held
middle-management positions, and 4 percent were upper-level managers.