Estimation of the Socio –Psychological Construct of Rural Leaders: An Agro- economic and Socio Psychological Interpretation

Rural leaders act as lighthouse to the villagers. They make decisions for the people where people interests as well as development of villages are involved. They tend to change the thought and action of others. The body- mind dialectics has got a dictum on the delivery mechanism of personality, which is being influenced by unique genetic characteristics and disposed of by its phenotypic expression through interaction with social environment. Thus leadership pattern, motivational elements of leaders, their psychological construct and personality profiles need to be studied in a framework to assess how all these factors do influence the attainment of social, political and cultural goals of common people. Any leader or person does act as per his/her social and psychological construct and the functions are unleashing by their structure. It is thus very much needed to understand the rural leadership structure so that this insight may be helpful in shaping up the capacity building programmers for the rural leader having an impact over the agriculture development in particular and rural development in general. Different value orientation or characters viz a viz variables were included in designing Socio-psychological structure like age (X1), community (X2), occupation (X3), education (X4), family size (X5), economic status (X6), five year Plan (X7), panchayat system (X8), Dominance (X9), Self Confidence (X10), Dogmatism (X11), Authoritarianism-equalitarianism (X12), conservatism-liberalism (X13), fatalism-scienticism (X14), familism- individualism (X!5), progressive –reactionary (X16), political ideology (X17), election-attitude (X18) and alienation (X19) which do form both configurative and compositional element of leadership. The present study was carried out with the rural leaders (Sociometric leaders and Institutional leaders) at Haringhata Block I of Nadia district in the state of West Bengal. The purposive sampling technique was followed in case of selecting the state, district, block and villages for generating the required data. From three villages namely Simhat, Fatepur and Mollabellia 100 respondents were selected. For some leaders selection have been must since there has been no choice but to select for example Panchayat leaders for some respondents the researcher has to opt for random sampling approaches since, some few have been selected out of relatively larger population. The selection of the respondent keep on encompassing a diverse score rural leadership like Socio-metric leader, School teacher, Head master, President of club and Co operatives etc. The selection of respondents has got both spatial and social dimensions.