ABSTRACT
Leadership development among rural-dwelling older adults is of great importance. Yet despite the need for rural leaders, the majority of programs on leadership development offer their trainings in urban areas and take for granted that the leadership training and the leadership itself will occur in areas where people can readily come together. The leadership team model makes a difference in how training for leadership is conceived. Much of the emerging rural leadership training also recognizes that the natures of connections among rural people are different than in many urban areas. This understanding comes with strong research support. The scholar Roger Barker very early on completed ground-breaking research on the concept of behavior settings and staffing theory that demonstrated that small settings result in people filling multiple roles in ways that are not the case in urban areas. In part, this means that in small settings, people are not siloed into a single role.
