The relationship between farmers’ quality of life and their leadership competencies

This quantitative study sought to explore Pennsylvania farmers’ perceptions of their quality of life during their busiest farm season and its relationship with farmers’ self-leadership and ability to lead others’ competencies. The convenience, unrestricted, self-selecting, and chain-referral sampling approaches were used to collect online data. The final data set included responses from 59 farmers. The overall mean score for self-leadership competencies was 3.93 (SD = .48), ability to lead others’ competencies was 3.96 (SD = .50), and farmers’ quality of life was 3.49 (SD = .69). A significant positive association found between farmers’ quality of life and self-leadership competencies (r = .64 p = .001), and ability to lead others’ competencies (r = .24 p = .013). Approximately 43 % of the variance in overall farmers’ quality of life was explained by farmers’ self-leadership and ability to lead others’ competencies. Extension practitioners should develop a leadership program for farmers that will address the following areas: farmers’ work-life balance during busy season and difficult conversations with farm employees.